


We Only Get Better

by Puniyo



Series: Parallel Universes [6]
Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: Alternative Universe - Art, Experimental Style, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Heavy (maybe dark) themes, It is not a sad ending (define sadness please), M/M, Mentions of cyberbullying, Stream of Consciousness, There is consent, Unreliable Narrator, an essay on intimacy, mental issues, mention of depression, mention of self-harm, mention of suicide, naturism, re-discovering intimacy, some crude language and banter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-11
Updated: 2019-11-16
Packaged: 2020-01-11 18:20:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 30,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18429545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Puniyo/pseuds/Puniyo
Summary: 'If we have another day, I will tell you.'What might save Javier are not words but the gaze of a pair of dark eyes.[UPDATED & COMPLETED 16-11-2019]





	1. Part I

**Author's Note:**

> Dear all, this is a rather weird and impromptu idea that came to me as own personal mental situation became rather unstable. This is rather personal piece therefore, almost as some sort of way for me to unwind from all that has happened lately and a way for me to find my own solace. I'm also going through a major block so pardon this rather strange style as well. I sometimes just stare at a document and I wonder what I am doing. I wonder what I really am doing. *facepalm*
> 
> This story will touch some heavy, perhaps not that dark as in violence (that I have already explored), but psychologically heavy. Please read the tags before deciding to read. If you do, thank you so much for joining this adventure. 
> 
> Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. In no ways it reflects the author or the people mentioned.

The droplets of condensation run between his fingers as the packet of chocolate (skimmed) milk is crushed under his grip, the flimsy plastic covering the arched straw wrinkling like a present wrapper in the thumbs of a toddler. He never wanted to buy the drink in the first place and he inserted the copper-nickel coin in the vending machine, the round fifty cent eaten by the capitalist avatar with the utmost haste, just to avoid the staring gazes behind him and the long line that had formed next to the entrance of the canteen.

A rectangular carton, a fancy tetra pak classification, partially recyclable, minimally pollutant, and completely rubbish. He puts it right next to his feet, already slightly deformed and a dollop of the brown sugary treat leaking from the aluminum opening but he could care less. Maybe a bird will perch on the package and have it for lunch. Maybe a god, any god, if they ever existed, could take it as an offering for their grace and point him a (proper) direction to look at. The part-time man that only came on Wednesdays evenings (he thinks he is neither a man nor a woman but they all call him mister in the staff room so he just follows them) used to say that the Creator’s compass was never wrong.

Javier hopes that there is some truth in his words because he has long lost the intuition for North and East. He is not short-sighted, perhaps only a little but the millesimal reductions of his eyes never really affected the way he held the brush and chisel, and the glasses he wore for the classes of the first year dreamers were a trademark of the followers of _Bautista_ and _Barceló_ (and also because many of the students thought he looked more handsome with them – vanity was a sin but not a mortal one. If it was, he tilts his head to the right side just enough to expose the vein right under his jaw even more, may the scythe come earlier.)

He is not myopic but there is only one direction that he stares now – down. The ugly sounding chime for the afternoon courses had just rung and Javier knows no one will come to the rooftop, much less to this part of the large plant. The zone for the heavy, chain smokers, a broken table with an even more dilapidated bench, the trash can filled with the corpses of lab mice accidents and flies of neon colors and monochrome fleas. A place for a quick fuck when they begged him or for a mouth on him that made him fall asleep much quicker than the quavering, inexperienced hands that pulled in all the positions except for the one that gave the much needed relief.

It was also the place forever forgotten by the maintenance team, the nails of the rusty bars of the railings already missing and the iron balusters cracking and peeling off with each autumn gust or spring breeze. Just like now, as the oxidized particles mix with the grey mist that Javier drags to his lungs as the ember on the tip of his cigarette burns the white stick. The concrete under his feet is hard, high quality cement stained with pigeon green stools, and yet, he feels it wobbling in the ascending tide of clouds and waves of shy sunrays that peak through the grey cotton above him. It is quivering as if he was in the middle of a storm, a summer typhoon visiting without warning that ripped the roots of trees and the bark of trunks. His blood rushes to his brain, a sudden injection on his temples, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 on the left, syncopated dubstep rhythm on the right, and he shuts his eyes for a second.

_Here we go round the mulberry bush…_

_… twinkle, twinkle, little star…_

_… are you sleeping? Are you sleeping?..._

_… if you have no daughters, give them to your sons…_

_… who saw him die? Who will dig his grave?_

_Will you Javier?_

The joint fall from his lips, down, perpetually down, to the vastness in front of him, down the windows of the edifice, down until it is lost in the air and he can’t see it anymore. There is no noise when it meets the asphalt on the street, if it ever reaches it Javier thinks, only the multitude of heads crossing the changing lights on the horizontal zebra pattern and the cars that horned shamelessly at the slower paced elderly, or so it seemed from where he stood. By the fourteen floor, people were no ants but colorful moving dots like an old pixeled computer game and the brown-haired man wonders if he too will become a dot if he jumps.

Or maybe he would be like his cigar, light and floating on the air, carried by the wind somewhere between the sky and the horizon, suspended on the immense expanse of the oxygen atmosphere, together with the urban sparrows and songstress starlings. What if he jumped? Would they finally stop singing? What if he took a step forward (he takes), and what if he just leaned into the barriers (he leans further)?

A free fall, parachute not supplied, a tribute to Newton’s gravity, down and always down, never up, never the top but the bottom, of the valley, of the abyss, of the trenches at the seabed, at the end of all life and the beginning of his own.

What if he jumped?

A solitary tear trickles down his lashes to the cheek, his chin, until it finishes its adventure on the back of his hand. It is so cold, gelid, probably scooped from the waters of the Arctic Ocean, and yet more splurges from his almond eyes, a broken tap refused to be fixed by a bolstering plumber. Javier is a quiet man and an even more silent one when he cries (so they won’t hear him). He bites his lips, chapped lips from the lingering dryness, swallowing a sob that wells on his throat and threatens to spill. It doesn’t and it changes into a hiccough, a spasm so robust that rivals the thunder a few blocks away at the end of avenue. The leather folder under his arm falls with the sudden loss of strength, the different carbon pencils, new, used, sharpened, broken, blackened rubbers, rolling to the rain gutter and the stash of loose papers scattering on the marked concrete.

He has no time to pick them up when the whimsical gale drafts them into the space between the buildings, crumpled texts, a few sketches of apples, tributes to van Gogh, bank statements, all flying in slow motion and gracefully hovering in the air like snowflakes. Huge polygons of snowflakes made of wood pulp. Ugly, utterly grotesque like he is. He will chase them. He will chase every single one of the sheets so the world won’t see him and the repulsiveness of who he was and will be.

He will jump.

‘It’s beautiful.’

The soft voice from behind is like a braking switch on his legs and he settles down the foot that had already leaped through the railing by the ledge of the rooftop. He takes a deep breath, his mind already mustering an excuse for being seen in such a strange position as he turns deliberately sluggish, dreading that someone had found him, again. He can already hear the imaginary shutter clicks and the flashes, the deafening piercing notification tones, the pointing fingers, ‘ _crazy man_ ’, ‘ _he must be sick_ ’, ‘ _get away from me!_ ’

‘Did you draw this?’

Javier has never seen the face of the young man, contorting, frowning, laughing, all emotions at once flooded onto the pale complexion of his forehead and the light tint of blush on his nose, a colossal contrast to the pink hue of his thin lips curved into a subtle smile. A few strands of his hair, black, perhaps in shades even darker and long enough to cover his earlobes, cascade over his eyes. Javier has no eagle vision but he notices how the stranger eyes are immersed in the same obscurity, whether they were a fake layer of glossy contacts or real quartz he knows not, or whether they were imbued with attracting magnetism of just his imagination, he dares not to even fancy.

‘J. F.?’ It is not the same tenor timbre, still velvety but clear, a mezzo of two extremes that he can’t classify, something between a graphite H and B pencil. ‘Is this your signature?’ He smells the two initials blurred in ink and he crunches his nose. ‘I don’t know many names starting with J. Not people’s names at least. Or foreign names. But you don’t seem like a foreigner to me.’

‘What,’ Javier holds to the flaking paint of the top rail, one of the balusters breaking with the weight of his body and he almost slips past the edge. It is his instinct, not his will, that makes him lunge forward, knee to the ground like a knight greeting his king. He gasps at the sudden intake of air, too harsh on his windpipe and one that lodges right on his throat, pressing on his vocal chords, scratching the inner walls and choking him for brief milliseconds worth an eternity.

The young man does not move from his spot. Not a single step.

Was he waiting for him to fall or to jump? Or both?

‘What do I look like to you?’ Javier lies on his back, staring at the murky sky, overcast in dirty silver and not the azure _they_ always sang.

‘I don’t know.’ The other man sits next to him, legs crossed, the same packet of chocolate milk on the palm that didn’t hold the fleeing paper, a pastel brown instead of the chestnut color of the one he didn’t consume before. He takes a sip from the straw, his moist lips enveloping and sucking at the plastic white tube. Javier wonders if the faint scent of vanilla is from the drink or if it is from the stranger’s perfume. ‘What do you want to look like?’ The young man tucks an unruly tress of his dark hair behind his ears, it not heeding to the gesture anyhow, as he traces the silhouette of the creature on the paper, neither human nor beast. ‘Like this? Something between worlds?’

‘A monster.’ Javier regrets his answer immediately as he sees the frame next to his twitch, the same uncomfortable tinge at his fingertips spreading through the vessels of his whole body.

‘An angel.’ The condensation on carton milk drips onto the charcoal on the sketch and the newly arrived boy smudges a pair of improvised wings, an amateur doodle compared to Javier’s honed skills. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have ruined your drawing.’ He smears the shadowy stain on his index onto the fabric of his sports hoodie, fingerprints branding the cream linen as he pulls the hems to cover his hips.

‘Are you a student here?’ The stale humidity over their heads stinks of undried laundry and burnt smoke of nearby chimneys and ventilation vents.

‘Are you a teacher here?’

‘Aren’t you late for classes?’

‘Do I look like a student?’

‘Are you not a student then?’

‘I don’t know the way to go back.’

‘Didn’t you come here by yourself?’

The boy with the obsidian marbles bites his lower lip as a tenuous smirk seizes his mouth. He taps his fingers on the concrete, on the ridges of the cement, the sound of his nails on the chunky dust irritating but paradoxically soothing at the same time. He stretches his legs as he arches his back like a cat, lethargic and lazy. If he was a student, Javier had never seen him before in the halls.

‘Why are you so interested in me?’

‘I’m not.’ The first drop of rain hits the bridge of his nose. ‘I just want to be alone.’

‘Me too.’ There is a hint of uneasiness in those syllables, a hidden hurt that Javier knew too well and that it made him propel to his elbows and look at the pale man, fidgeting with the zipper that ran from the neck to his waist. ‘I just wanted an empty building. Somewhere with no one. I was wrong apparently.’

The grimace on his face when he darts his tongue out to scoop the drizzling rain, almost like a shower of cotton flowers that does not soak their clothes, is both childishly absurd and endearing, Javier thinks. The way the pink flesh spreads the moisture over his lips though, plump from the continuous caresses, is almost sensual.

‘Why?’ The hazelnut haired man swallows dry as he observes the minuscule crystalline drops perching on the long eyelashes of the stranger. ‘Why?’

‘Shouldn’t you know the answer to that question the best?’ There is a battle between their stares, nutty almond on raven diamonds, in a bubble outside of time, but Javier soon concedes defeat and he dodges from the unwavering attention, afraid he might be devoured by the gaze of the pair of celestial black holes. ‘I just wanted the same as you.’

‘Do you still…’

The sudden discharge of the lightning on the rooftop of the building across theirs cuts his ability to form words and he sees the younger man (or so he believes) close his eyes, blinded by the advent of the violent bolt. Javier grabs the stranger’s hand, the bones and cartilage of his fingers almost brittle that he fears he might crush in his impromptu clasp, and he drags them both inside the building as the downpour, the main aria of the opera, finally greets them. The steel door closes with a loud thud and he inadvertently pushes the dark-haired boy against the cold tiles as he trips on the slightly raised step of the frame, pressing their bodies together. A high-pitched moan echoes in the gloomy staircase, one that no one would normally use.

‘Definitely the gentleman of my dreams.’ The young man massages the back of his head and neck, hissing at the pain from the impact.

‘I’m sorry.’ It is not the waist that is bruised but Javier finds his hands already drawn to the slender midriff. Even in the dim crepuscule of the fire escape, he can see himself reflected in the glow of the eyes of the man he still knew not of the name, the two of them almost of the same height and each of their breathing tickling the other’s upper lip in their asynchronous rhythm. ‘Are you okay?’

‘I’m…’, his reflexes are really of a feline as he shifts and squirms from Javier’s imprisoning hold on his svelte silhouette. It is just a step away, to the side, returning the initial distance between them. ‘I’m fine.’ He sighs, loud and resonant, of relief laced with apologetic remorse, almost as heavy as the roaring thunder outside. ‘Guess there is another day for the two of us.’ He turns to leave, the strings of his jacket pressed against his chest the same way the soaked hood plasters over his nape when Javier catches him, again, by the wrist.

‘Wait.’ There is something hard against his hand, perhaps a watch but he can feel the shape of spheres etching on the lines of his palm. ‘What is your name?’

‘Will you remember it?’

‘What?’

‘My name.’ The young man balances on the balls of his feet, almost twirling to hide his faltering steps. ‘Will you remember if I tell you?’

‘Maybe.’ He probably won’t. ‘But I want to know.’

‘Why?’

‘Because…’, Javier wonders why too, why there is this precipitous curiosity climbing his knees and gnawing at his stomach, curdling his gut and finally scaling the ribs, one by one, until the eager inquisitiveness constricts his heart, ‘… isn’t it the right thing to do? To try to know people?’

‘It is, isn’t it?’ The smile concealed by the eclipsed shadow on the stranger’s face widens to a saccharine imitation of the real one, a counterfeit fraud that could easily fool anyone, except the mauled and tortured glimmer on his irises as he wrenches his hand from the grip of the brunet, freeing himself and burying it on the back pocket of his damp jeans. ‘But I won’t tell you if you will not remember it. I will never exist if you don’t remember who I am. Isn’t this lonely too?’

‘But I–‘

A trembling finger presses onto Javier’s lips, sublimating all the syllables of the unspoken promise. He tries to chase the vanishing warmth at the tip but it flees as quick as it tiptoed his skin, taunting him for more, denying him from a further second.

‘Another day.’ The young man is already walking down the steps, the echo in each stride resonating in Javier’s ears. ‘If we have another day, I will tell you.’


	2. Part II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A glimpse into Javier's mind...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dear all, this could be called a character development chapter, mostly (basically) focused on Javier and for us to dive into his mindset before moving to brighter shores. I am actually happy that I've managed to go through this (wordy) stream of consciousness (I now understand why Virginia Woolf loved it so much). 
> 
> Note: I'm no expert in art, much on the opposite so pardon the references.
> 
> Disclaimer: This is a work of FICTION!

The faded acid stains at the marble countertop are the ugliest parody of a proper dirty blotch that he had ever seen. It was the lemons, Galician ones, or the limes, the tiny emerald ones they bought in the exotic grocery shop just around the corner. The lady at counter always insisted they had been picked fresh the day before from the Thai tree her husband had offered her in the 36th anniversary of their wedding vows. It was a citrus fruit like all others, fragrant at touch, zesty when the pantry smelled of rotten eggs left to spoil from weeks ago, and sour enough to corrode one’s palate. Just like it scourged the veins of the counter where the coffee grinder was and refused to work.

Javier knew it was their fault, those manicured fingers with sap from nettles and the oyster powder (pearl essence as they always corrected him) that adorned their ghostly cadaverous faces. They reminded him of the different clowns on the popular fairs when he still lived in that minuscule village by a barely functional salt mine, pink salt that the folks believed it had gained color because it was drenched with the blood of the martyrs who had been buried there during the Holy Wars. He never liked clowns, not because he is afraid of them, his latest girlfriend gave him more goosebumps when she screeched in the shower than when a serial killer with an axe on the right hand and an electrical drill on the left barged into the room of a sleeping virgin, but because they insisted in making him flash a smile with their bruised noses and dull routines of failed gait and oversized pants that could fit a dozen of poodles, a giraffe and perhaps a tyrannosaurus toddler in them.

Javier hated smiles. He abhors them. Except the one from the boy at the rooftop.

The stains won’t leave the beautifully crafted slab of the counter no matter how many times he wipes them. At first it was just clean tap water, then a dollop of the antiseptic disinfectant from the automatic dispenser by the photocopier, and now a trail of the ginger tangerine detergent by the sink. Javier contemplates bleach, there must be some in the biochemical laboratories at the end of the west corridor on the fifth floor, undiluted and as ambrosial as the cheap _eau de cologne_ they all wore. He is too tired to climb all the steps though, and Javier throws the cotton towel to the basket of the sponges, resigned to another failed attempt to return the marble to its raw perfection.

It has been almost ten minutes since he arrived at the pantry and the coffee beans are still intact, oval brown rocks that rested on the compartment of the demure grinder. The crimson LED is on, a single dot at the base of the machine confirming the existence of current and voltage but no matter which button he presses (there is only one actually), it remains silent, incapacitated, dead in its quietude. It is their fault Javier knows, their stupidity in putting star anise and cloves for improvised chai tea (he dare not to even taste their concoctions – not that they had ever offered him any), ice cubes to make shaved ice like they had seen in Japanese magazines which they couldn’t read a single word, not even the title, and olive pits and walnut shells for facial masks according to some beauty guru on questionable porn filled websites. How have the blades survived so far, he seriously wonders.

Javier sighs. He glances at the clock hung on the wall above the window pane. Less than half an hour before his class. There is nothing more than he wishes now than a cup of coffee, warm, even boiling to challenge his cat tongue, milk an option, soy extract forbidden, two spoons of brown muscovado sugar not white please. He switches the grinder between OFF and ON, again and again, and he is earnestly thinking of recording the plastic clicking sound for the girls on the studio next door making a short film for some sort of eerie soundtrack since their current pursuit for a symphony of maracas, triangles and cymbals can’t be anything else but a bizarre track for a mass murder scene.

Resignation dawns quickly and Javier punches the metal covered body of the modern mill, a subtle red shade spreading through his knuckles immediately, the pain of the violence registered seconds later. ‘Fuck’, he would have never guessed that his nerve endings were so sensitive. It was just skin-covered bone and perhaps a little of cartilage, but damn, anger seemed to stir his emotions to new heights, even break his capillaries as a droplet of blood forms right on the hill of his middle finger, and he grabs a flimsy tissue (recycled tissues of the worst bargain possible that were already withered with the humidity of the air of the past few days) before the counter top is tattooed with another stain. At least the coffee beans are finally being ground, the machine suddenly functioning in intermittent intervals resembling a child’s bout of whooping cough.

The sky outside welcomes a thick blanket of dirty silver clouds, just like that day on the rooftop. The concrete floor outside is dry but the smell of imminent rain is heavy even with the window closed. Javier cannot understand the newest fashion trends, the neon pink hair dyes blended with fluorescent orange braids, or the turquoise tresses draped over a bald half-head, woolen scarves and straw strapped sandals, skull bags on top of unicorn buckle belts, of the flux of students now running to enter the building. Maybe extravagance was the common evil of all who aspired to be artists, but a mop of black hair catches his attention and he leans forward, his own forehead pressed to the glass panes. He can’t see the face of the boy, he thinks it’s the correct masculine noun, and yet he remembers that lanky body that the loose sports jacket can’t hide or the waist underneath it.

It must be the same person, it had to be. Perhaps he came only when there was rain. Maybe he was hail’s favorite son and sleet’s most hated daughter. Maybe he took the sun hostage on the back pocket of his jeans and had no intention of returning it to the heavens, except when riding a rainbow carriage. Maybe he was a new student who had just enrolled the day before yesterday and still had no acquaintances and friends and who had not yet been recruited by the obnoxious student union for their millennial activities. Maybe he was a student who had dyscalculia and all the numbers of a clock danced in front of his eyes, an arithmetic rumba and an exponential foxtrot, so he was always late for the morning classes. Maybe he was a student in the drama department, a literature enthusiast who read _Baudelaire_ for breakfast, _Pessoa_ when lunch was too bland, and acted _Nietzsche_ for dinner.

Maybe he came just for the rooftop because being alone is better than any unsolicited company and being by oneself is better than being alone.

Maybe, maybe, maybe…

‘Are you going to Moir’s reception dinner?’

Javier flinches at the question (not directed at him though) and he turns around on his heels, pretending to have not been surprised by the arrival of the stilettos and leather soles that stank the whole pantry with their organic wax that was everything but natural.

‘I have to, don’t I?’

‘Don’t we all?’

‘C’mon, it’s probably going to be fun.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘She is not.’

‘Yes, I am! Think of the salmon canapes and the pink champagne cocktails. We don’t even have to greet him.’

‘But it’s tomorrow and I haven’t thought of a gift.’

‘Do we have to get him one? He never bought us anything even when he worked here before.’

‘Yeah, he made us pay for gasoline that time in G. Can you believe it?’

‘Just get him a lava lamp or something.’

‘Lamps are expensive nowadays. You don’t expect me to just wrap a light bulb and write a nice note, do you?’

‘What’s wrong with lamps?’

‘Finesse.’

‘Which you clearly don’t have.’

‘Hey!’

‘Who cares anyway? He probably doesn’t remember us.’

They keep talking and babbling, the gossip unfurling from their tongues as smoothly as the venom from the sting of a scorpion. It prickles on each one of them as they flash their blanched teeth in constructed smiles, their gazes overlooking for spots in shoulders to stab a new swiss knife and for clefs in the armors for the next attack. They are ambulant strongholds of lies, mazes so perfectly crafted that they didn’t even knew where the truth was or if there was any. The final shrieking giggles from the group are worse than a broken string of a violin for Javier and he shakes his head lightly, tired, it’s morning but he is tired of their voices.

He just wants a cup of coffee.

‘Oh Javier,’ the woman in the group who hasn’t stopped playing with her diamond (probably quartz that was on sale) ring switches off the coffee grinder and scoops the dark powder into the pot next to it, ‘sorry, we didn’t notice you were there.’

When did they ever noticed him?

‘Right,’ the three piece suit man, whose name he can’t (he won’t bother to) remember has only been transferred last Wednesday but he talks as if he knew those vultures his whole life, ‘you just can’t stand there like a cactus all the time, _Javi_. Say something, won’t you?’

‘That’s my coffee.’ Javier points at the grinder, now empty, only traces of the tiny particles spilled to the counter top.

‘Oh, it’s only enough for three cups.’ The peroxided blonde points at their colleagues and her mouth shuts into the most unapologetic flat line. ‘We are in a hurry. Would you mind if we used it first?’

‘Go ahead.’ He raises his palm in defeat, switching places with the group as they move to where he stood by the sink, already lost in their tales of Instagram slander, while he refilled the grinder with new coffee beans. The first few that hit the bottom of the pot are turbulently loud, waves crashing against the sandy shore, but they are soon thin flakes of fish in an aquarium, mute and light.

‘So… did you and Jason last night?’

‘Ah! That’s why you have such huge dark bags today.’

‘I don’t! And nothing happened.’

‘Why not? He seemed very keen to drive you home after your fifth beer.’

‘Do we really want to talk this in front of Vincent?’

‘What’s wrong with me?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Everything. And don’t pretend you weren’t making eyes for that carrot on the pool table.’

‘She was the one who came to me first. And I was a gentleman to refuse her.’

‘Why? It doesn’t sound like you at all.’

‘She’s a student here.’

‘So what? It didn’t stop you before from pulling your pants down.’

‘They are the ones to do it.’

‘Who has slept with whom?’ It’s the second time that Javier flinches in a span of less than a few minutes. He relaxes just as immediate when a hand pats his shoulder blade and places a mug next to his, the cracked one with an emblem of a stick and puck that he had bought for him when they went together for the final of the Universiade Hockey Challenge. ‘Sex for breakfast, are all the bakeries on strike today or what?’

‘If only you were funny, Patrick.’ The shortest of the group slaps his elbow playfully as she completely ignores the conversation they were having just now. ‘We didn’t see you at the club last night. Mommy didn’t let you out to play?’

‘Daddy is strict with his curfew.’ Patrick and he had been childhood friends, inclusive attending the same kindergarten but Javier doesn’t have memories of that time, except for the blue checkered bibs and the art days where they would run along long strips of canvas paper with their feet covered in paint and glitter. He doesn’t like when people step into his personal bubble, much less when they touch him (unless he initiates the contact), but he doesn’t mind now as Patrick encircles his arm around his shoulders and pulls him closer to his chest, both their biceps colliding, and the newly arrived man places a kiss on his nape, right where his hazelnut curls ended. ‘But we know how much he likes to punish me, don’t we?’

The pantry falls silent, only the blurting noises of the coffee kettle as it finishes brewing the last drop clogging the gaps of awkward silence amidst all of them present. Between disgusted stares and choked sips, they are both soon left alone and Javier can finally breathe. Not just the physiological cycle of exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide at the lungs, the air flooding the alveoli and irrigating the trachea. He can taste the earthy aroma pouring into their cups with each inhalation and the exasperation to flee lessen and dissipate as he expels them in controlled intervals.

‘Thank you.’

‘I only came for the coffee.’ Patrick repairs the distance between their bodies and he clinks their cups together before he leans on the door frame, rubbing his lower back on the knob to scratch an itch as he raises his mug to his lips. ‘Okay, maybe I wanted to pluck a few feathers of those chickens who thought they were peacocks.’

Javier laughs as he murmurs a taciturn ‘cheers’. He gathers his folder when the bell rings Korsakov’s _Flight of the Bumblebee_ , only half of the cup drunk and the bitter taste lingering in his palate.

 

 

The classroom of the first-year fine art’s students is normally full of people chatting about their weekends on Mondays, a stash of easels on the corners, a few blots of paint in the window blinds and a never-ending mountain of newspapers to cover the wooden planks on the floor. It rivaled the plaster bumps on the ceiling of the sculpture studio opposite to theirs, the holes on the walls from drills for reasons no one has yet found out and the racks of bowls and dishes from their pottery electives. They were an academy, not a hotel, but there was always a plated sign on their doors politely asking the cleaning staff to ignore these two rooms. In the beginning it was just a single yellow post-it telling them not to clean the space, but these were either lost with the gust of the passing people and the inquisitive fingers and they soon printed their own 3D handles forbidding the entry to strangers without the proper password (and risking to be cursed by the spirits of _Bernini_ and _Rembrandt_ ).

Today, though, there are probably only a dozen of heads, perhaps a couple more, most of them quiet, a troop of strangers who barely knew each other’s names or Javier’s face, but he prefers it that way. It was not a compulsory module and he had made sure to tell them last time that it wasn’t an assessed task, just one for them to unwind before the mid-term exams, which were circled on the DIY calendar with a few tears the week after. Javier had not told the students what they were doing as well. It was some sort of trial to see who the ones who had a true passion for their degree were. Either that or because they had forgotten they could skip class today, had lost a bet, or because they wanted to impress him and collect a few compassionate marks. Pity that generosity had to be earned and not offered, though he could make today an exception.

‘For the braves ones standing here, consider yourselves lucky as well,’ he scribbles a few names on the blackboard, _Matisse_ , _Braque_ , each one with a different chalk color because he liked the vision of his fingertips smeared with the amalgam of the pastel powder, _Derain_ , _Valtat_ , and the texture of the sticks reminds him of his cigarettes which were still faithfully aligned in the sealed packet by his desk, _Manguin_ , _Metzinger_ , ‘our theme today is back to nature.’

‘Are we going to draw trees and flowers?’ The girl with the ponytail sitting on the last row copies the names with hurried swirls of her fountain pen.

‘Shouldn’t that be van Gogh?’ The boy at the other side of the room could be a tower on a chess board but his voice is soft and clear like an ocarina and yet somehow there are a few too strongly bursts on the closed vowels.

‘Is it a field trip for today?’ All the eyes turn immediately to the windows behind them to check the state of the weather although unnecessarily since a beam of golden luminance already laid on the uncovered floor, the atoms of dust bathing in suspension on the ray of sunlight. Some of them smile innocently at the prospect of leaving the building, their nails tapping the metal support of their chairs.

A wave of nostalgia washes over Javier as he steals a millisecond of the collective awe to order the reel of negatives sprinting in his mind. Had he been as enthusiastic a few years ago when a brush would be tucked in his underwear instead of his wallet, or the chisels properly sharpened and ready to be used instead of the myriad of dirty knives and forks with Bolognese sauce waiting to be washed? Had he the same glimmer in his irises the first time one of his sketches was chosen as part of the exhibition on local artists in the most prestigious gallery on the high-end district?

Where was that Javier now, and who was this Javier then, that had taken hostage of his skeleton and muscles, who did everything just like the Javier that used to exist did, but at the same time not be that Javier?

‘It’s the human body.’ They all stare at him as if he had said something out of this world, a string of letters and characters that they had never heard, belonging to an ancient language already extinct and lost in the Babylonian records of mythological cities. ‘A naked body.’

The baffled gazes transmute into whistles and claps both from the timid and shy batch to the outspoken gang who were already pulling out their large cartridge paper pads. ‘Is this why you kept this class in the secrecy of the gods, Javier? So that you could enjoy the model?’

‘Won’t you enjoy the view as well?’ Javier allows (and likes) the occasional banter with the few smartest rebels, perhaps because they reminded him of who he was, or maybe who he wanted to be before the dam of his own synapses crashed and buried his world underneath all the water.

‘You bet I will. Do we get to ask the number?’

‘Of what?’ The oldest girl sitting right in front of Javier, also the one with the most normal outfit, as far as ripped jeans and plaid shirts fall into the category, gestures too exaggerated spheres at the level of her breasts. Her hands move downwards, keeping the same round motion but hovering over her crotch, earning a few good chuckles in the room. ‘I’m not sure which ones you are more interested in.’

Whatever innuendo, excessively blatant or stupidly personified, Javier is not keen to add to his own vocabulary as he leaves the space on the side door that gave access to another compartment, a much smaller one, almost like a dressing cabin of a run-down theater, where they kept the works that had no use but were too loved to be discarded into a landfill. Patrick was the one who had contacted one of his (many) friends in the fashion industry and arranged for someone who wasn’t afraid to pose _au naturel_ and who also did not mind feigning the stance of a corpse, immobile and sterile, sitting or standing for hours, perhaps one whole morning, without worrying that the neck would be crooked or the different vertebra would be fused together from the dullness of the procedure.

For such a tiny attachment, the room was also sound-proof as Javier can’t hear any of the hysterical roars and the only noise he registers are his own sighs and the hem of the cotton robe that hits the table top where a figure is leaning on. It is too dim to really recognize the person, if he had ever seen the pair of hands that flung the sash back and forth like a rhythmic gymnastic ribbon, but the shoulders are narrow, and the blades protruding gracefully like curled wings. The garment reaches only the calves and the exposed ankles are as delicate as the rest of the silhouette.

‘I’m sorry. Did you wait for long?’

The young man turns abruptly at the source of the words, almost tipping forward from his pirouette as he tries to anchor his bare feet on the exact same spot where he stood. In the dusk of the room, it is impossible to discern any colors to build a spectrum but Javier _knows_ exactly the shade of black, darker than the infinite, of his hair and which two celestial stars he would paint his eyes like.

Javier swallows once. Twice the hardest and the third time he gains courage. ‘Is this another day?’


	3. Part III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ‘Yuzuru Hanyu.’ The young man kisses his winged reflection. ‘That is my name.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dear all, stream of consciousness continues in this chapter but our muse finally returns. I don't know what else to say, I'm at loss of of words lately for the simplest things, my mind doesn't cooperate, but thank you so much for supporting this little work <3
> 
> Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction!

‘Is this another day?’

Javier wonders how many days have passed since that afternoon in the rooftop when their eyes have first met. It is not that he has no awareness of time because he knows it is probably the best sprint runner and the best marathon player of all the universe, but he wants to repeat that question over and over again as he stares into the pair of obscure eyes. Maybe the young man had a different philosophy when it came to eternity, a paragraph from _Alhacen_ and a page from _Mach_ , or perhaps he wore a hourglass chained to his jeans, the same ones he sported that day, that counted a unit smaller than a nanosecond with its grains of sand and there were millions of them in the prism glass body. He would stare at them every night before he went to sleep, see them form a pyramid in the bottom and then he would reverse the apparatus, the crushed rocks metamorphosing into celestial glitter, the neck of the Hercules and the tail of the Centaurus constellations. Maybe there is no time and not a day has been gone since he spoke to the boy in front of him and this now is the moment after they had scaled down that set of stairs.

‘Is it? Is it not?’

It should be, Javier wants to say, but his tongue refuses to roll for the proper vowels and a low grunt is the only sound that his open mouth can muster. There is a slight shrug of the younger man’s shoulders (was the robe too thin and he too cold?), a movement that Javier imitates promptly in commiseration, not of the boy but of his own soul, and he steps back in the same pace as the stranger journeys out of the shadows of the room. His elbow brushes Javier’s one, a miscalculation of the distance of their bodies and yet, the Spaniard loses an infinitesimal stance of his balance, a punch on a boxing ring that threw him to the ropes stretched from corner to corner. The dark-haired boy chuckles, the dim sound echoing in the space around and between them. It should be another day because the wands of the clock have stopped now that he stares at the pair of obsidians locked into his almond ones, both of earthy tones and yet both so different. There is a veil of glimmer in each one of the marbles of volcanic ash that he knows not if they are tears in response to the lack of light or if it is his own reflection in them.

Javier shakes his head as he guides the young man out of the darkness to the half empty classroom. It can’t be his own reflection, he realizes now, because that would mean that he had left part of himself in that rooftop that day and anything left behind had already been washed by the rain. Or maybe there was really a mirror imbued in that unfaltering gaze but Javier doesn’t know who the person is that stares back at him from the looking glass, a man that looked exactly like him, curls of lion’s mane for hair and a stubborn beard sprouting the morning right after the night he had shaved, one that he waves _hola_ to but refuses to greet back. It can’t be his own reflection because he has long lost the ability to have one and all the doppelgangers leave him, like all the other people he thinks might stay until the print of their shadows vanish. Maybe he was the doppelganger and the real one was gone, missing to some parallel universe. One of the many.

‘Oh…’, there is a collective gasp, even a singular whistle from one of the Mondrian disciples, as she would call herself, ‘that’s why you took so long there, professor.’

‘That was definitely enough time to get the _numbers_ and even more.’

‘C’mon Javier, I bet my whole allowance for _League of Lunarians_ on you.’

‘Then I hope you won’t be getting back your money soon.’ Javier throws a shard of the chalk stick to the desk of that gamer at that remark, the cowboy wannabe dodging the bullet that landed right on top of the screen of his mobile phone. The whole class laughs, light giggles that fill the air like the grout of the tiles, and he too lets the muscles of his face relax and contract at their own pace for the smug grin he so dexterously mastered over the last six months.

‘So,’ it is still a whisper like last time, the only time indeed at the rooftop, and yet it filters through all the other frequencies and it echoes in Javier’s ears, a pure tone that he could not mistaken for some other noise, ‘where should I stand?’

‘Just over there.’ He points at the relatively empty square nearby the back wall, one that had not yet been attacked by graffiti in a homage to Jackson Pollock. ‘Just be yourself.’

‘Just be myself.’ There is an almost pitiful sneer at that last sentence, Javier notices, something tipping on the tightrope of anger and agony as the chosen model walks in silence. He doesn’t walk. No, it is really a juggle between the balls of his bare feet and his ankles, a strange gait, levitating if gravity allowed him and sliding at the same time with invisible blades on non-existing ice. He turns around, pulling the ends of his sash until the woven cotton of the robe slides past his shoulders and hits the floor. ‘How is that possible?’

Javier decides that it is a rhetorical question, it had to be since no other mouth in the whole room answers it, all the eyes too fixated on the forthright and honest nakedness, and he too has no answer for improvised philosophy in the morning. Or for any other time of the day, if time existed at all.

‘Do I just stand here?’ He takes a few steps forward and immediately retracts the itinerary, stretching his arms above his head, twirling his lower limbs in the hyperactive energy emanating from the lack of clothing. ‘I’ve never done this before.’

‘A virgin.’ The same _Lunarian_ boy blurts out, already prepared to duck away from another missile.

‘Touched for the very first brush.’

‘It’s sketching today. That’s charcoal, you know?’

‘Fingers then. Fingers.’

‘You are sick and frustrated. Sexually. And both.’

‘C’mon I didn’t even jerk–’

‘Eww!’

‘No one wants to know about your secret technique.’

‘It’s not a secret. Look, if you want me–’

‘Can you…’, Javier is about to interrupt that literary piece of an innuendo when the most petite of the group, the girl almost hidden by the desk for her small stature and with a headband with equally tiny pineapples (she always wore it with a Japanese camellia on her neatly tied bun, a statement of how she loved tangos and flamencos), points to the tall, bar-styled stool just in front of the window frame, ‘… sit there and look outside? Yeah, exactly like that. You look…’, she stumbles on her words and Javier wallows together with her as the young man obeys the suggestion, shifting slightly until he finds the most comfortable position to be for the next hour or so, ‘… even more beautiful than you already are.’

Much to the Spaniard’s surprise, silence installs between the brave ones that decided to attend the class that day, their mutual nods and clicks of tongue replacing any teasing and banter he was expecting to never stop. It is perhaps even faster than the speed of light the way all the easels and canvas are drawn out, without any extra encouragement, and the vines of the burnt blocks onto the sandpaper. He almost feels like a satellite orbiting around the little stations, fixing the angle of the papers or the aperture grip of the fingers, but he is soon back to his own desk, his own sketch book on the working surface, a little ragged on the corners and loose sheets threatening to fly out, open, the natural ashen hue of paper pulp inviting him to acknowledge its presence. Javier hadn’t drawn since _that_ day, a day that the calendars had erased for him as a favor. He doesn’t remember it at all, nothing, what is in the past means history, and history is only told if there are no defeats, and Javier has never won a battle.

The stranger though, Javier exhales deeply all the oxygen, the carbon dioxide and the burnt wood he was holding back without realizing it, is the war trophy for the trenches he had never been to. He is all the angels on the wizardry annals, a seraphim with bleeding wings, and all the pages of the supernatural, the carbuncle with a lost garnet, a Valkyrie crying for the fallen raven, no – a swan, all mythology trapped on that slender body of pale complexion and dark hair that barely drapes over his ear and the longer ends meeting with his arched eyelashes. His eyes stare at everything and nothing, perhaps beyond what a normal human could, at the reverie of something the Spaniard doesn’t dare to ask.

He is all curves and edges, Javier exhales again, as he tries to mimic the contours of the chiseled profile of the young man’s face, the thin line of his nose down to the chin and jaw. He has synchronized his breathing with the subtle bob of the Adam’s apple, ascending and retracting like the ribs on his chest. His elbow draws a knee to his navel, hiding the view to his belly button and also to his sex, Javier gulps, louder than he wanted. There are only glimpses from where he sits, the pink bud of his nipple and the equally flushed tip of his length, shielded by the delineated muscles of the toned thigh and hamstring. It is a body like many others, Javier tells himself at the arrival of the mental slap for the rising heat on his cheeks, and he darts his attention to the curvature of the spine, of the various ridges and valleys of the vertebra, a long trek until the smooth buttock pressed on the surface of the stool. The position must take a toll on his posture and he veers just a millesimal of a centimeter to the side. No one notices the vacillation, but Javier does, like all the puny twitches of his eyelids and the jolts on his joints and at the back of his neck, and the growing numbness at the extremities.

Like the faded marks on the inside of his left wrist as he adjusts his foot so he won’t fall from the chair. Marks that were not really marks but patches of recently healed skin, like the round scars below his armpit, easily distracted by the short hairs there, but not to him. He knows too well what they really are and his own skin throbs at the sight of them.

Javier wonders if the young man has ever had sex.

 

 

Time does exist and the multitude of steps at the corridors switches at the same speed as of the digits for seconds in a digital clock. Javier collects all the discarded drafts as the bell rings for the end of another class, normally too late for all the other days but he protests for its precocious arrival this time. The same pineapple girl asks him for a few extra pointers for the upcoming examinations, even for those not taught by him, ‘you will have to hunt Patrick for those,’ and he lifts his gaze towards the back of the room.

The young man of winter night hair is already gone.

Perhaps he had never been there in the first place, Javier shakes his head as if it was a raffle box, with the idea to dispel the hallucination of that exposed, sylph body. If he had dreamt, so did the whole class, but rumors of that outwardly apparition already roamed to the sophomores and seniors. He sighs of relief as he opens the door to his own office, the plate with his name almost falling down. The hot glue gun was, hopefully, still in the cupboard of the sculpture pantry and he almost diverts his path for it when he hears some sort of sound, something he can’t discern from the inside.

The sable nymph is supporting his own weight on the desk, hips bent over the edge of the pine surface, fully clothed, as he picks up a photo frame next to the monitor of his computer. He wore jeans, different from the pair that day on the rooftop, tight but not constricting, enough to hug the flesh underneath it, tucked in badly tied boots and a thick scarf over a Celtic knot shirt. He doesn’t move from his spot and his lips press together in a greeting smile.

‘Hey.’

‘How did you get in?’

‘It wasn’t locked.’ Javier is sure he had twisted the key in the right direction before leaving for class. ‘Nice place you have here.’

‘Four walls and a window. I could hold a hostage here if I wanted.’

He closes the door and leans on the frame, his shoulder blades fixed on the frigidity of the hardness petrified on his back, blocking the exit. If it wasn’t there, he would have probably fallen into the void that was always hanging on his silhouette, waiting for him to finally dive into it.

‘So that’s what I am?’ The younger man crosses his legs but uncrosses them immediately after. ‘A hostage?’

‘If you have someone to pay the ransom.’

The chuckle eases the staleness of the air in the small compartment and Javier feels tempted to follow the same lead but the smirk morphs into the same straight line the raven boy had when he was the subject of all of the sketches. The stranger stares at the floor, at the slightly lighter blotch on the carpet that was already there when Javier moved in, a diluent stain most probably, rocking his head to left and then right and left again. It is almost childish the way he taps his fingertips on the desk with a melody only known to him but Javier doesn’t find it annoying.

‘You look different in the photo.’ The young man counts the number of people in the 4R sized film behind the glass protection. He turns it to the Spaniard and pretends to be surprised by the unforgiving signs of evolution.

Javier doesn’t even know which one he is anymore. ‘Older?’

‘Better.’ There is no hesitation. ‘I like the way you are now better.’

The scarf is almost at his shins from all the fidgeting and he pulls the tassels on one of the hems, tailoring the length and the volume of the voluptuous wool to around his midriff. There is a glint on his irises that is trying to pierce the infinite as he sneezes and miserably fails to suppress another one. Javier finds the clumsiness humorous, too comedic, and he concedes a giggle. ‘Who are these people?’ The faint, rosy hue of embarrassment betrays the young man’s grown-up stance.

‘Friends. My friends. My sister’s friends.’

‘You don’t look that close to them.’ He points at the man standing next to Javier, at the center of the photo, an arm circling the shoulders and a hand on the hazelnut curls that were definitely a few centimeters more extended than those he had now. ‘Except this one. Is he your lover?’

‘He was.’ Javier doesn’t know why he admitted his sexuality so easily and casually to a stranger he had only met once in a rooftop and now invading his office. ‘Not all fairytales have a good ending.’

‘They never do. You are a good man, _Javi_. Keeping a memento of a partner that no longer makes your heart leap over the Pacific Ocean or your dick rise above the Everest.’

‘Should I shred it then? Feed it to the stray dogs on my way home?’

‘I would have burn it. Burnt every single one of them.’ The pair of obsidians are a duo of daggers and they penetrate him to the marrow of his bones. They are nothing like the playful tone of his voice and Javier almost slips from the intensity of that glare, frenzied and almost manic. ‘But why burn them?’ He corrects himself as he places the frame back to where it was initially, the dust on the surface marking its precise location. ‘Why burn them if there is no resentment or guilt? When feelings are gone like the last drag of a cigarette… it is just a person, like all the others. Not someone from the past nor someone from the future. It is just another person. Isn’t it, Javi?’

He nods, unable to utter a single syllable with the lump ingrained in his throat. He keeps nodding until his whole body follows the same motion. Neither of them is naked, naturists for a class of art graduates but Javier feels exposed, his ribcage open and the diaphragm contracting to scoop his heart out. The boy in front of him, who he has only met once (twice) on that day and the only thing he knows for certain is the color of his hair, comes to his den and bares his core with a few pretty sentences tossed into the uncharted space between them.

‘What are you doing here?’ It comes out harsher than he had imagined. ‘Applying for the position of a love counselor?’

‘I’m waiting for you to pay my ransom.’

‘Is that your take on the Stockholm syndrome?’

‘You are the abductor here.’

‘Isn’t this Lima’s then?’

‘All these fancy and unoriginal names,’ the stranger finally hops to his feet, a diminutive jump, not even a quarter of a rotation completed, ‘since this is between us, and only the two of us, let’s call it the _Javier Syndrome_.’

He is not sure which variation, his full name or the shortened deflection, rolls more suavely from the young man’s tongue. Or which one he likes to hear better. He wishes he would continue to call him, just only until he had the confirmation for that doubt. ‘Javier Syndrome?’

‘Yes. The psychological condition in which you are so afraid of my raw charisma that you pay me to survive.’

‘I’m not afraid of you.’

‘Pity.’ He plunges his hands on the back pockets of his jeans, cupping his buttocks as he shrugs his shoulder. Even with the mocking pout on his lips, Javier thinks he is beyond beautiful. ‘Because I am.’

‘I have no intentions of hurting you.’

‘I know.’

‘But written cheques are not my job. You should go to the administration building, that ugly, pigeon shit green block right next to the flags.’

‘Oh…’ the sigh escaping the dark-haired man is so loud Javier can taste the disappointment at the tip of his tongue. ‘I guess this where I say good bye, Javi.’ His steps are of the same levity as before, shoes or no shoes, the only accent of that stride being the rattling of the beads tied at his wrists.

‘Wait.’ The Spaniard grabs those same beads, glassy cold against his palm, forbidding the dashing muse from treading out of the door. He swears it is the same perfume, that same scent of vanilla he inhales from the proximity of their bodies. ‘It’s already another day. You promised me you would tell me your name.’

‘The drawing.’ The young man pulls his wrist free from the sudden clasp. ‘I want to see the drawing.’

‘Which one?’

‘The one you did in class. I know you did one.’

‘I didn’t.’

‘I saw you.’

‘They all did one.’

‘I only want to see yours.’

There have been no victorious battles for him and this one would be no exception. Javier lays the badly tucked folders and untied manila envelopes on his possession on his desk, a few files falling out onto the keyboard and his chair, and he withdraws the sheet at the bottom of the sketch pile from his class, wrinkled at the corners and nudges of charcoal fingerprints on the back.

‘Why?’ The young man bites his lower lip, muffling a surprised laugh as his fingertips trace his own portrait on the paper. The glimmer in his irises is another, completely divergent from all the other sparkling flickers in that morning. Maybe that was part of his core too, spilling to his eyes of nightly shade, or a shard of his core that was lost and finally found.

‘I don’t know.’ Javier really doesn’t know why but as he watched the stranger standing at the back of the classroom beside the window pane, naked, bathed only in the leftover ray of sun from dawn, the Spaniard knows there was a pair of wings on the back of the one whose name was still a mystery, embracing the fragile frame, protecting him from the solitude engulfing his soul. ‘I really don’t know.’

‘Of the one born in feathers and bowstrings.’

‘What?’

‘Yuzuru Hanyu.’ The young man kisses his winged reflection. ‘That is my name.’


	4. Part IV

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ‘It was around one month before you came.’ A pause. One second. Two. Almost a minute. ‘It was suicide, Javier.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please read the tags before reading. Thank you for the support.
> 
> Disclaimer: This is a work of FICTION. It's all a concoction from my sick mind.

The door to his apartment weighs nothing like the metallic duo from the elevator he had just left. The neighbor from four floors above, the chubby lady in a tracksuit three sizes small for this figure that he had not yet learned of the name, kept complaining about the suicidal sparrows that always flew straight to the windows of her room and left stains impossible to clean. Her voice resembled that of Maria Callas in terms of volume and a blocked toiled flush pipe in its quality. Javier was relieved that he lived on the lower stories if that meant that he could be released from that claustrophobic lift earlier, the changing LED numbers on the small screen on the right corner making him more and more anxious as she kept her discourse on the evolution of migratory paths and global warming.

The Spaniard’s flat is exactly the same as he when he had left in the morning for the Academy. His collection of loafers and trainers tucked beside the entrance in an improvised shoe shelf, the single navy blue cushion by the sofa shaped something between a hard candy and a hot dog sausage, the crystal astray on top of outdated newspapers that he had not even leafed for their content (it was probably the usual political corruption disguised under investment on public infrastructures and advertisements for farming machines in third world countries that did not even had agricultural land), perfectly ironed curtains that he draws to the sides now to check the phase of the moon (it is probably close to a waxing gibbous). He doesn’t turn on the lights of the living room, moving instead to the kitchen, the sterile drawers and the minimalist lamp cover of stainless-steel contrasting heavily with the vivid green of the countertop of recycled glass on the island in the middle. He throws his keys onto the fruit bowl and the mangoes looked rather ripe for a chutney or seafood salad. Javier is not thirsty but he grabs a beer from the fridge, the aluminum cap popping loudly under his fingers and the condensation droplets immediately forming on the sides of the bottle.

There are two dishes of porcelain by the recycling bin on the corner, not too big but also not too small. They are simple in design and as austere as contemporary art allowed except for the name EFFIE written in a 16th century cursive calligraphy. The one filled with water to the brim is pristine clean, only a couple of tiny flies swimming in that pool and Javier scoops them out as he notices them. The tuna flakes on the other one though is everything but fresh, a darker, dry crust on the topmost layer and a few olive-green moldy hairy patches growing at the edges. He throws away the contents immediately, running the dish over the tap water until all vestiges of the rotten matter are gone. Maybe he shouldn’t have changed the brand of the canned fish to a cheaper one and he mentally apologizes as he refills the bowl with the only option left on his dry food cupboard, a chili oil infused tuna from the Mediterranean Sea.

The Spaniard is not hungry, far from it, his stomach churning at the bitter leftover taste on his tongue of the fermented drink. He places a shallow pan on the electric stove though, dinner is a habit and habits are supposed to be mandatory checkpoints in the list of a normal human being, and he cracks two eggs, translucid protein turning white as it contacts the heat from below and the yolks breaking free and coating the non-stick surface. He almost doesn’t need to look at the different bottles of herbs and spices to his left, chopped chives and a dash of nutmeg, as he adds them to the cooking creation. Once he had mistaken cardamom for white pepper but his tastes buds were definitely braver than he was and there was nothing unusual besides the extra trip to the bathroom afterwards.

Javier transfers the almost burnt scrambled eggs to the first plate he grabs from the dish rack, the steam arising from the food sickening him, the foul smell of the spiced seed and the vile bile accruing in his esophagus, and he chooses to wash the skillet and all the other utensils by the sink, the citrusy aroma of Galician lemon and Thai lime of his detergent calming his nerves.

There is nothing special on the television channels that night, the eight re-run of quiz shows with questions impossible to be answered unless one had been a scholar for over a millennium, comedy-labelled shows that were everything but funny and magic tricks that were not even illusions when the hidden person’s legs could be spotted in the background tarpaulin. His fork fluctuated back and forth on the plate in the same pace as the value line of the stock market shares, and Javier switches off the apparatus, moving to his computer instead by the coffee table. An e-mail from their faculty reminding all the staff of the meeting the following Friday, a notification of his sister Laura’s Facebook page of new photos she had posted from her trip to Iceland, unknown sender, marketing correspondence for a new flavor of condoms and slippery scale of lubricants, spam, spam and more spam.

Javier leans back on the couch, taking a deep breath as he rubs the bridge of his nose. His almond eyes are open but he gazes aimlessly at the ceiling, at the buttermilk paint and the slightly darker strips from humidity. They were ugly, the contours of each blot not resembling anything coherent but also nowhere classified as an attempt of abstract art. They are hideously grotesque and yet he can’t stop staring at them, their shapes morphing into something different the more he pours into their lines and curves, until they all converge into a single large ink stain that stares right back at him.

His own face.

The polyphonic church bell of his message notification destroys the trance shackling his mind and Javier pulls out the phone from his pocket, the purple LED blinking the arrival of an incoming text.

[Patrick, 20:26] How was today in class? The kids kept dreaming of the mermaid.

[Javier, 20:27] I’m neither a biologist nor a historian.

[Patrick, 20:27] Your naked model. Julian even asked him for a private session.

The Spaniard grips the phone harder as the name of the one on the rooftop rolls from his tongue. ‘Yuzuru.’ He says it a couple more times, trying different variations in the pronunciation of the syllables and the stress on each letter, afraid he might forget it, when it had been etched and carved into every single one of his neurons since the young man had confessed it to him.

[Javier, 20:28] Do you know him?

[Patrick, 20:29] Julian? He definitely likes your classes better than mine. Especially after today.

[Javier, 20:29] The _mermaid_.

[Patrick, 20:30] Why? Are you interested in a private painting too?

He is not. Javier shakes his head vigorously, pressing his lips together to fortify that opinion. He likes the name, ‘Yuzuru’, the way his dark eyes were crystal spheres with all the nights of a specific moment in time, the levity his fingers brushed at photographs as if he could really touch all the people in the light film. He likes that he knows nothing but a name and a face with a body of pale complexion, one that appeared when it pleased and did not exist until another day.

[Javier, 20:33] You are the one who contacted him.

[Patrick, 20:34] My friend did. An acquaintance of a friend. I don’t even know how he looks like.

[Javier, 20:35] Like a mermaid.

[Patrick, 20:35] You will have to teach me how to understand your Latino sense of humor because I’m missing something.

[Javier, 20:36] Fuck you.

[Patrick, 20:37] Sure. Remind me the next time I go to your place.

It is almost automatic the search for the middle finger emoji (it is the first one in the most used list for their chat) and Javier sends his colleague a screen full of them. His scrambled eggs are already cold he doesn’t bother to take a bite, typing the name of the model agency on the search engine of this laptop as Patrick texts him the number and address of the ‘fishing market for mermaids’ as he affectionately dubbed it (and another rather impolite expletive from the hazelnut-haired man). A small business venture of less than five years but with quite a few major contracts already, the lists of pretty faces by gender, by age bracket, by height, by the color of the irises without contact lenses, reach their end without _Yuzuru Hanyu_ ever appearing on the screen. Javier is not sure if he typed the name correctly, spelling had never been his forte, but he tries all possible combinations until he has almost memorized all the people under that organization. Every single one of them except for the boy of the rooftop.

The Spaniard can’t be hallucinating, he reassures himself, and he pursues his quest on a new browser, a tingle of excitement simmering on his fingertips as he navigates through the keyboard. With all the current security and privacy breaches anywhere on the web, playing detective and criminal online shouldn’t be the most strenuous game he had ever gambled on, although Javier has no idea if he is the one with the magnifying glass or the one seducing the authorities. Or both.

The search is completed in less than two seconds, as gratuitously reported at the end of the first page. Blank pages of servers that do not exist anymore, ‘404 NOT FOUND’, etymological sites explaining the origins and family trees of surnames starting with ‘H’, ‘Find out the ten most popular baby names according to the birth month’, advertisement-filled databases with the only intent to trick stupid users into clicking random porn. There were a few blogs too, openly accessed accounts of horny teenagers and environmentalists demanding more signatures for a petition to save the North Pole bears, all with a similar name – Yazura, Yuzuri, Yuzurai – but none with what he had in mind.

Except for one account, @wingsofwords, on a forum that he accidentally enters when he presses just a little too hard on the touchpad. Javier almost closes his laptop altogether when he sees the avatar picture, a typical square of 150x150 that made any picture rather ambiguous, and he stares at it. It was the back of a boy, short hair and turtle neck, the sepia tone filter slathering the canvas in brown and caramel wash, alone and arm extended on the air for a thumbs up. It is ghost profile, blank and secretive like a riddle in itself, daring those who want to know more to tie the clues together and be lost in the maze of the solution.

More than a bet on a casino roulette, this was a game of faith and Javier is already baptized to this new religion, (his instincts are) as his fingers have already chosen ‘Register’ and he was finalizing the holy ceremony. He doesn’t think much, @swordlessmatador the first alias he can muster, he inserts one of the least used e-mail addresses, the one that he had purposely opened for dating websites, with dating being synonym of an anonymous and consensual fuck, and he chooses the first icon on the never-ending list of thumbnails, a caricature mushroom probably taken out from a vintage Super Mario game.

It was the quintessential forum for adolescents, love tutoring threads, how to get into someone’s pants without the other party noticing (or minding), study notes for all types of subjects from Adam Smith’s invisible hand on the capitalist laissez-faire to the quantum mechanics proposed by Schrödinger and the eponymous cat in his honor, tips on how to iron a shirt without setting the apartment on fire, the best (hopefully) medicinal concoction to fight (alcoholic) cocktails. He didn’t recognize names, most of them outrageously stupid and immature, but there were many faces that Javier had seen in the Academy, on the corridors and stairs to the different floors, in the classrooms in compromising positions and some others on the toilet stalls exercising their hands in ways that he preferred not to be reminded of. The Spaniard ignores the standard, pop up welcoming messages and the memo to check the etiquette rules, and searches for that dark silhouette.

If he was a detective, he was being misled to a dangerous cul-de-sac. If he was an offender, he was walking blindfolded to a landmine. The ghost of that account was as silent as an impersonation of the intergalactic void but there had been quite the activity surrounding him in the archives. If Pandora boxes existed, he might as well swallow all the demons inside – they couldn’t definitely compete with his own.

_‘I’m so sick of them!’_

_‘Don’t you think they look nice together?’_

_‘Couple of the year? Yeah, why not? Wait until his father finds out.’_

_‘Did you see his neck? That wasn’t a hickey for sure. Seems like finger marks to me. These two are into kinky shit, I tell you.’_

_‘SICK!’_

_‘They should just die.’_

_‘Did you see his face when he got out of the principal’s office? It’s what he deserved.’_

_‘I just saw them in the southwest carpark. Someone’s got daddy’s car to play with.’_

There are more than a hundred similar posts and messages, all gossip and threats, most of the candidly taken pictures already expired from the hosting servers and not available but those that were still shown on his screen were always about two young men. The black-haired one was never directly caught by the camera shuttle, just the angle of his collar bones, hamstrings and knees, sometimes reduced to a mere shadow of exaggerated proportions, a giant in contrast to his slim body and slender waist, one that Javier couldn’t mistake for someone else’s. The other figure, and strangely familiar, had his hair bleached into peroxide blonde, his face an ambulant sun and a smile was almost his signature in every snap. The clingy type probably, there was never more than a meter of distance between the two males, an arm over the shoulders or tucked into the back pocket of the pants, directly on top of one of the butt cheeks, intertwined fingers, a kiss behind the ears, lying side by side near a rivulet.

They were lovers. They are lovers. Yuzuru’s lover.

Javier shakes his head as he swallows a newly formed lump on his throat. What was so strange for a (beautiful) boy to be in a relationship? That was what functional people did, right? Meet friends, go out for a couple of dates, first kiss under the moonlight, a corporal promise on ruffled bedsheets, the diamond incrusted platinum ring, children and granddaughters. No, he kept swaying his neck from left to right like a broken robot, Yuzuru was like him and they were different. They were against the world because the world was not that sweet promise sold to manipulate empty shells disguised as humans. Because he had found in that pair of obsidians the flicker of what he thought he had lost.

Because he was simply Yuzuru.

It is the second time of the night that his phone shatters his reverie and his own ringtone is so strange to his ears that he thinks for a second the breeze outside has broken into his window and demanded a dance from him. The Spaniard taps the cushioned pads of the sofa, creases and in between these for the electronic device, the music continuing in ascending volume until he kicks it. When and how it had fallen to the floor, he has no idea.

‘Hello?’

‘It’s me.’

Javier knows perfectly who the caller is even without having looked at the flashing screen before. There was probably no one else who would summon him at those hours. ‘It’s you.’

‘Wow Javier, you could definitely win the Nobel Prize of Comedy for this.’

‘There’s no such category.’

‘They might just start one for you.’

‘What is it Patrick? I can’t lend you any more condoms.’

‘And keep the whole collection for yourself? Greedy, aren’t you?’

‘My limited edition ones are not for your dirty hands.’

‘Used ones?’

‘Recycled.’ He wants to sound impatient and annoyed at his colleague, it was their own way since college of assuring that things were fine and worry was not necessary, but he sighs a half smile instead. ‘If it is about the mermaid again, you might as well go hunt that werewolf living in the sewers of second avenue.’

‘I know you don’t like to share your bedtime stories with me, don’t worry. They changed the venue for the meeting this Friday to Palisade Hotel.’

‘A hotel?’ He leans back on the couch, looking back until the inverted kitchen counter seems suspended from the ceiling and his neck contracts into a rather painful cramp. ‘Is our department suddenly so wealthy and senseless?’

‘You know how these things work. Meeting in the afternoon, seafood buffet in the evening and drunken fucks for the night. You struck me as someone less naïve, Javier.’

‘I just didn’t want to believe that.’

‘They do. And you can’t say no this time.’

‘Why not?’

‘C’mon Javier. I know they are all crones and they feed on the dirt under other people’s nails but the principal insisted everyone to be present and if you want your cute ass in the same chair next month, you better come.’

‘The principal will be there?’

‘A last-minute addition. No wonder we will have raw oysters this time. You know, virility enhancer as they say.’

The previous messages in the forum flood the Spaniard’s mind in a tsunami without warning and he sits promptly, elbows on knees, the sudden lifting motion making him dizzy. ‘How long has he been in that function?’

‘Long enough for you to know that neither of us will ever sit on that leather throne.’

‘Do you know…’, his palms are slick with sweat and there is a numbness to his jaws, ‘… do you know if he has a son?’

‘All big men have honey-laced families and the principal is no different. What? Are you suddenly interested in being a father? The paternity woes of middle age?’

‘You’re the uncle here.’ He taps his foot on the surface the coffee table, almost sending the forgotten plate of scrambled eggs to the carpet underneath. ‘Does he?’

‘He has one.’ There is a moment of hesitation from Patrick and he Javier swears he can hear the long drag before he speaks again. ‘Two actually.’

‘Do you know them?’

‘You know the eldest one. That miniature of a man in the human resources with the Maltesers tie every time he spends the night on his mistress place. He is only there because of his father.’

‘And the youngest one?’

‘Oh…’, it is the first time that Javier senses Patrick become serious about something (not that he was a joker, perhaps only between them) and his voice drops, ‘… he was a brilliant boy. We used to think that he had come straight from the savannahs of the Lion King with that golden hair of his. He was an angel. He truly was.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘You didn’t hear about it?’

Javier shakes his head but he realizes it is impossible for his colleague to see, much less guess his gesture. ‘What?’

‘It was around one month before you came.’ A pause. One second. Two. Almost a minute. ‘It was suicide, Javier.’

The Spaniard chokes on his own saliva, coughing a few times until his breathing stabilizes. ‘Suicide?’

‘Yes.’ The monograph hammered on his temples exactly like _that_ day. ‘He jumped from our rooftop.’


	5. Part V

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yuzuru’s lips are no blossom but pulsing flesh brushing his own, chapped by the nightly breeze. It is saccharine vanilla and ripe summer strawberries with a pinch of sea salt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What should I say but that this chapter is a prelude to the reason why this fic is rated mature and who knows about a possible change in that letter. 
> 
> Disclaimer: This is a work of FICTION!

_No one thought that he would choose that path. You know, I would sometimes see him in the hall and he always had a smile on his face. His father told us one day that he dreamed of being a pilot so he could rescue lost kittens on stormy nights. We all thought he was happy. And then he jumped. When I arrived at the Academy the body was already taken away. No one thought he would do it. Why would someone do it?_

Patrick’s words still echo in Javier’s mind as he steps out of his apartment empty-handed, his mobile phone out of battery and forgotten next to the ashtray, only the keys to his flat securely tucked in the front pocket of his jeans. He doesn’t lock the door and it closes with a loud thud that probably has the neighbors cursing him for the noise but he could care less. He trails down the stairs, the elevator seemingly not fast enough to send him out of building. He is suffocating, Javier knows, his lungs constricting the alveoli into hardened blocks of steel, and he skips a few steps, hopping some and slipping on the last one, his heart pumping too strongly against the veins on his temples that he thinks his head might crack under the pressure. Air, he needs air, not from ventilation fans or fire escapes, but simply air, oxygen, nitrogen and argon in its magic formula. He doesn’t reply to the ‘fetching dinner, Mr. Fernández?’ from the security officer of the condominium, nodding slightly as he passes by the visitor register desk.

It is almost nine in the evening, three meandering hours until the end of the day and there are barely any traces of the twilight sky left, only a few streaks of fuchsia blending into the horizon stained in gentle brushes of indigo and teal. The scythe moon peaks from behind curtains of ginger clouds and Javier lifts his chin, focusing his gaze on random stars, Alpha Centauri or Achernar he knows not (astronomy not his hobby), as he draws in the night-infused air. The cosmopolitan swirls of fast-food chain’s bacon and buttery croissants attack his nostrils relentlessly with their misguiding health promise, just like the overly sugary punch of mango and a fruity scent he can’t fully define from a nearby Middle Eastern grocery store. There is also rain and the Spaniard closes his eyes just for brief seconds.

It is the water droplets condensing on their way down the atmosphere, of liquid that becomes sleet and joins all the other fractal flakes into hail crystals. It is the water on freshly mown grass, of sap that leaks from slashed cinnamon bark among a forest of Hispanic cedars. It is probably the smell of time when it stops in its never reversing tracks, a fragment plucked from its infinite millennia of history, so no one knows when it began and also when it will end, if it ever ceases.

The chilly breeze of dusk gnaws on Javier’s exposed neck, jolting him awake from the transdimensional journey of his mind, and he walks down the street in direction to nowhere. The light footsteps are barely audible amongst the erratic horns of impatient limousines at traffic light coordinated junctions and baby strollers on zebra crossings. One step, two steps, the pace is almost lethargic until he feels a surge of edginess on his lower limbs and joints, and he gallops through the pavement, avoiding colliding into the human obstacles. The chaos is seeping into his pores again, the _Gucci_ suit man yelling on the phone about a failed stock transaction, a young girl crying because of the man on his knees with a velvet box and ring, the sudden power failure at one of the posts just around the corner. A face hidden by an oversized _Real Madrid_ cap extends a tiny plastic bag with a few blue pills to Javier and he almost trips with the sudden intrusion on his path. The Spaniard doesn’t even care to reply and keeps running, sprinting away from all the worms crawling on his skin from the urban sewers, the blinding neon signs of ribbons and hearts, and the prostitutes leaning under the glow of vulgar temptation.

His jeans are not the best fabric for a marathon, the denim rubbing on his crotch and restricting the widening angle of his legs, and he would take them off if being naked was not considered a public offense. They don’t deter him though, from reaching the almost isolated park by now, not a park, just a few benches and barbecue grill stations overlooking an unsupervised beach. His shirt is already drenched in sweat, the darker patches of salt circles on his armpits and lower back clinging to his body uncomfortably, and Javier plunges his head on the running water of the nearest drinking tap. There is nothing but the sound of the current that moment trekking down his ears, his cheeks and chin, until someone closes the fountain, the last drops hitting the drain like the hammering of a xylophone. _Do_ , _re_ , _mi_ , and the keys fall all over the place.

‘If you want to drown yourself, there is a better place.’

His vision is blurred by the sudden lack of oxygen as he lifts his head too quickly, but the gaunt silhouette leaning over the concrete sink is just like the one on those photographs. The fingers of the young man dab an annoying rhythm on the hard surface and he hums some words in a language that the Spaniard doesn’t understand.

‘Where do you recommend then?’ Yuzuru’s cheeks are slightly flushed, a rosy blush more beautiful than any artificial makeup, Javier notices. ‘My parents told me not to trust strangers.’

‘I thought you had already ditched the diapers, _Javi_.’ He stretches his arms above his head as he curves his spine backwards with an enviable feline flexibility. The sigh that escapes his lips once he returns to a normal standing position resembles more the meow of a kitten. ‘Do you want to come or not?’

It wasn’t a question but an ultimatum and Javier follows Yuzuru, not asking anything else. It is night and the domain of the shadows spreads beyond the dim direction lamps the city council had promised to change. The young man has almost the same outfit as him, worn out jeans that do not hinder him when he climbs the protective fence on the hill to the beach and the hood of his sports jacket too big for his skeletal frame.

The vastness of sand is a deflating air mattress and Javier sinks further into the grains which each step he takes. The footprints left behind are huge compared to his shoe size, heavy and few inches deep – his own weight and the weight of the monster he carries within him, two beings in one, commensalism and symbiosis, and he thinks the beast will overpower his volition, if it hasn’t already. The sand is warm, irradiating the heat accumulated from the day and the Lilliputian shards of quartz almost burn at his feet. They only prickle though, as they slip in between the gaps of the crisscrossed strings of his casual running soles and infiltrate his socks.

‘You are so slow, Javi.’

The sound of the young man’s falsetto cry is masked by the crashing waves, lost in one of the many songs of the sirens lurking nearby. They sit on the strip right before where the water reaches them, the sand only damp but not soaked in cascading degrees of darkness. It is a marker of the fluctuating tides, low by dawn and becoming feral at the sight of an imminent sunset. Maybe because they are now settled in the border of the torrents, a surge of power percolates into Javier’s body. He is being infused with the virtue of two worlds, of the liminality between the real and the imaginary, and he believes he can win over Nature if she threw him the glove for a mortal duel.

‘Shoot Javi.’ Yuzuru doodles a few concentric circles in the leftover marine foam, the bubbles bursting at the contact of a fingertip and dissolving the trifling child’s drawing in mere seconds. ‘You want to ask me something, right?’

‘No.’ Javier does but he refuses to submit to the curiosity that was gnawing the walls of his stomach. ‘Don’t _you_ want to ask me something? I was quietly enjoying my evening jog.’

‘In jeans?’

‘In tight jeans.’ All the hours of honing the art of lying are sabotaged by a subtle smirk and the Spaniard stretches his legs, eyes focused on the intruding soft shell crab walking in the periphery of his vision. ‘Don’t you want to know more about me?’

‘Do you think I should?’

‘What?’

‘Know more about you?’

Yuzuru’s irises must have been doused in magic, a spell that he could cast in silence, and was now pulsing with such magnetism that Javier stares at the pair of obsidians with the same intensity. In the veil of the night, there are fireflies of different glows dancing in the irises, eaten without mercy by the black hole of his pupils.

He thinks he might be swallowed too.

‘You make your own choices.’ He chose to follow him to the beach, didn’t he? ‘Free thought and free will.’

‘But what else should I pry from you that I don’t know already?’ The young man fidgets on the sinking sand, leaning closer until their shoulders barely knead each other. ‘Your age? You are old enough to be married Javi and yet you don’t wear a diamond ring and you never wore one. The color of your eyes?’ He tilts his head, pretending to be pensive. ‘There are days when they are honey candies that never melt and days when they are caramelized hazelnuts on a chocolate cake. And now…’, the older man sees himself reflected in that unfaltering gaze, neither one of them blinking at their proximity, ‘… they are fallen leaves in an Autumn day waiting to be swept by…’

The list of technicalities has no end as Yuzuru keeps bombarding the air between them with more and more details he didn’t know he had in him, ‘you are a man of the last century’, and yet the Spaniard hears nothing of the alphabetically encoded strings. ‘You are an artist but your style is only for you since you have made a pact with rascal spirits to guide your watercolors and gouaches,’ the young man’s eyelashes are long and they probably touch the cheeks when he sleeps, Javier wonders, and he is mapping all of that stranger into the deepest cells of his memory, the single drop of sweat glistening right above his Adam’s apple and impregnating the mole just below the edge of his jaw, ‘you walk as if you jumped and you jump as if you plunged into trenches on battlefields,’ the quirky shapes of his mouth as he talks and his lips, ‘you only wear suits for cocktail meetings but your ties would put Jackson Pollock to shame.’

His lips. His lips of poppy flowers disguised as carnation petals, slightly coated with saliva. Thin lips that are becoming full and plump with each nudge of teeth as the young man bites in between his breathing. They must taste like the thrilling vanilla perfume that the ocean can’t camouflage and Javier lunges forward, pressing their mouths together. The power of the two worlds might not defy Nature and yet it thwarts his rationality and it releases the shackles of his instincts. Yuzuru’s lips are no blossom but pulsing flesh brushing his own, chapped by the nightly breeze. It is saccharine vanilla and ripe summer strawberries with a pinch of sea salt.

His lips are redder when they part, balance restored, and the rooftop stranger is in the same position as he was just now, ankles together and swaying left and right, dark eyes on almond ones.

‘What was that?’ The pink tip of his tongue licks the lower lip as if savouring the last remnants of that caress.

‘A question.’ Javier tentatively places his hand on Yuzuru’s thigh, gently, testing how far he can reach. ‘You asked me if I had any.’

‘Do you need an answer?’

‘Yes.’ A lone seagull perches on a nearby lichen boulder and its screech pierces the laden silence. ‘Or do you prefer blonde ones?’

The young man flinches at the mention of a golden mane, the jolt spreading to Javier’s phalanges and numbing his fingers. The faint smile of resignation adorns his pale complexion, so tragically beautiful that even he can’t disintegrate it into nothingness. Yuzuru chuckles, the Spaniard knows not of what, of his own hunger, of his regret for half interrogations and even more incomplete replies, of this moment only between them and no one else’s.

Only the two of them.

It is Yuzuru who nudges closer in infant steps, inviting the hand at his thigh to rest upon his waist, and he surrenders the pretence of resistance. Their lips are mere inches apart, the breath of eagerness brushing Javier’s cupid bow and teasing the blackened spots of shaved hairs when Nature acts revenge and the first wave of the high tide washes over their mingled legs, their seated buttocks, the wrists supporting the weight of their silhouettes.

‘Fuck!’

The water is gelid and it penetrates the fabric of his clothes instantly, his muscles jerking with the unrelenting coldness and the spasm on his hamstrings makes him jump to his feet immediately, a few cursing expletives embellishing the tyranny of the sea. The wet stains on his pants drafts a monochrome photograph that almost seems like he had relieved himself in the attire, the hem of his shirt also dripping and clinging to his navel. Another wave topples in their direction again and he takes a few steps back, only to be pulled by a pair of hands plunging into his back pockets, an Olympic dive into the frothy pool.

The laughter of the boy next to him is louder than the Neptune’s trident.

‘What the fuck, Yuzuru!?’ The sprig of coralline alga caught by his teeth tastes of raw fish, of shells of rugged clams and bitter herbs of folk medicine handled by ancient generations.

The young man rolls along the newly irrigated patches of sand, the grains pasting the notch of his neck, his exposed nape, on the tip of his nose and on the tiny wrinkles at the corner of his squinted, smile infused eyes. His symphony of snorts and joyful roars echoes in the isolated beach. He barely stands when repetitive pirouettes make him dizzy and Javier catches his elbow on time, just before he trips forward to keep balance. He is drunk without alcohol, inebriated with the starry sky and the saline gusts, but he turns his face away when the Spaniard leans in for another kiss, dodging the lips that brush the corner of his mouth.

‘We should go. Before we catch a cold and you have to fill an encyclopedia for your sick leave.’ Yuzuru slips from the grasp on his arms and a few tresses of his dark hair cascade over his cast down gaze.

‘My apartment. Let’s go back to my place.’

There is a moment of silence before the young man moves, neither nodding nor refusing, slanting back and forth on the balls of his feet. ‘Is that a question?’

‘No.’ Javier nudges their shoulders together, just how Yuzuru had done when they were sitting side by side. ‘It’s what we will do. My place.’


	6. Part VI

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ‘Come in.’ The Spaniard notices the young man petrified by the shoe cabinet on the entrance doorway. ‘Or are you afraid of me?’ 
> 
> ‘Afraid of you?’ Yuzuru chuckles as he walks in, his hands sliding along the velvety finish of the walls. ‘Afraid of what? Of what you could do to me?’ 
> 
> ‘Maybe.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi there, people! I'm planning to end this story soon, perhaps a couple more chapters. As you've probably noticed, the rating for this story has also increased. Heavier issues will come soon as well but nothing like some tears before a smile. 
> 
> Disclaimer: This is definitely a work of FICTION!

The walk of shame, Javier thought, was only popular in kindergarten and primary schools when the little boys insisted in pulling the candy shaped elastic band of the girls and when the girls would scribble ingenuous love declarations in random notebooks, sometimes even on the attendance folder of the class. It has been one decade, two, maybe even more, he has no idea how the pages of a calendar fall anymore, if they ever do, but the contained giggles and pointing fingers are exactly the same ones as before, his hazelnut curls too effeminate to be the goalkeeper of the elite team in the school, his crude arm movements too brute to skate on the temporary ice rinks during Christmas, his posture too slouched to ever be remediated for the dance elective Patrick had once convinced him to go for the sake of impressing his then muse for the Celtic inspired theme etching project, his now ex-girlfriend who still bothered him occasionally with drunken messages about the true size (if any) of Patrick’s (if any too) dick.

The night breeze is dramatically humid with the rain that refused to fall anytime soon and the denim clings to his quads and hamstrings like a second, very uncomfortable skin that he wish he could shed like the scales of a cobra, layer by layer, tissue by tissue, skin, flesh and bones, until there was nothing but his core and even then all he could do would be to stare at his own emptiness. They are both wet, he and Yuzuru, and yet the young man walks with the same levity and unworldly grace just like that morning to the back of the room, body naked and basked in the sunlight, unfaithfully drawn in the canvas of the different students. Under the dim warm LED lights and isolated streets, Javier can still sense the mocking gazes from the windows on the seconds floors, the tenants calling him sick and psycho behind the ironed curtains, and the few bystanders leaning on the doors of cocktail clubs and prostitution dens snickering at the sea water stains on his crotch, the jeans constricting his sex even tighter. Everyone knows, he tells himself, everyone. There is no way he can hide for much longer, if he ever did.

He is a _monster_.

‘There are so many tonight,’ Yuzuru suddenly stops and Javier almost bumps into the human pillar, ‘I have never seen that one.’ He points at one of the smallest but brightest dots in the sky.

The Spaniard’s eyes follow the guiding path of the other’s fingertip but a passing cloud blurs the brilliance of the celestial circles for brief seconds. The moon though, stares right back at him, reticent and merciless, perpetually arbitrating his movements and raising the red card like a broken traffic light. ‘Have you never seen stars before?’

‘Not with someone like you.’

He swallows dry, the lump on his throat plunging to his ribcage and further down to the balls of his feet, chaining him to the concrete pavement. ‘Someone like me?’

Yuzuru bites his lower lip while shaking his head, a pendulum of black tresses balancing to the sides, and he turns around, resuming his unsteady pace. The young man twirls on the tactile pavement as he mutely sings, lips quirking into different voiceless shapes and heels bouncing in a blend of serpentine and hopscotch patterns. He is a child that moment and an adult at the same time, a man and a woman too, all the semantic polysemes and neither of these dichotomies. He is everything Javier sees in that lapse of time, mind and soul bared to the Spaniard, and he wants to join in that improvised pagan dance. No, he wants to arrest him in his arms until he stops and tells him what sort of _someone_ he thinks Javier is. Wrong again. All he wants is to hold the pair of obsidians hostage until there is nothing else in those dark irises except for his own reflection, until…

… until he presses their mouths together, lips on lips, and the taste of burnt vanilla and summer strawberries asphyxiate him in their alluring promise of death.

Javier sinks both hands into the front pockets of his jeans instead, the kaleidoscope of his thoughts locked in a treasure chest without a key, and he accelerates his gait, an arm distance apart from the dancing stranger, leading the rest of the itinerary to his apartment in utter silence. He can’t hear the voices of the vagabonds in the shadows anymore, not a single _go home you freak!_ , only Yuzuru’s rock rendition, or so he thinks, enough for him to know the young man is still following their pact made on the beach.

The security at the desk of the condominium is already snoring, head resting on the various monitors on the corridors, parking lot and elevators, and their arrival doesn’t stir a single twitch from his slumber. The fluorescent green number on the lift panel indicates both compartments had halted on the top floor and Javier opts for the stairs of the fire escape in lieu. The steps are numerous, a vertical marathon that reminds him of the same race to the rooftop that day, faster than any escalator. They are both slightly out of breath, an occasional faint cough and chests heaving, a chaotic symphony that is almost erotic by the time they reach the destined door and the key slides in without struggle.

The air inside still has hints of nicotine from the charred cigarettes on the ashtray by the coffee table, the tassels of the curtains swaying with the draft invading the living room from the open window, and the forgotten scrambled eggs dinner commiserating with the blackened laptop. Even in the dark, Javier knows by heart all the corners and creases, where the dust caches in the carpet dents, and the favourite spots for the mouldy patches on the matte enamel ceiling.

‘Come in.’ The Spaniard notices the young man petrified by the shoe cabinet on the entrance doorway. ‘Or are you afraid of me?’

‘Afraid of you?’ Yuzuru chuckles as he walks in, his hands sliding along the velvety finish of the walls. ‘Afraid of what? Of what you could do to me?’

‘Maybe.’ He flips the nearest switch for the overhead luster but the fluorescent tube flickers incessantly in its quest for inducing an epileptic seizure and he returns it to its initial obscurity, making a mental note to replace it tomorrow. ‘You don’t know me.’

‘So what do you want to do to me? I’m at your mercy, _Javi_.’

Even in the darkness of the surroundings only sullied by the faint moonlight and refraction of the street lamps, Javier cannot hide from the piercing stare and the challenge of that rhetorical inquiry, fracturing all the masks he had so dexterously put on and threatening now to expose the monster. ‘Do you want something to drink?’ He ignores Yuzuru’s conceited laugh as he runs to the kitchen, not daring to think further of all the possible tours he could explore in the slender body of the young man. He pretends to have heard a positive response and he pulls two transparent bottles with an equally translucent liquid from the fridge.

Yuzuru is crouching next to _Effie_ ’s feeding bowls, his thumb tracing the brim of the water dish, when he turns around. There is a smile as he dips in the finger. ‘She was lovely, wasn’t she?’

The bottles almost fall to the ground if he wasn’t crushing them under his hardening grip and he takes a deep breath. He wants a cigarette, a joint, any other more powerful drug injected into his veins until his brain is numb to all the memories he had not yet erased and those that he thought were already gone. He takes another breath, stopping the watery veil on his eyes from leaking. ‘Why are you doing this to me?’

‘She is looking after you. She knows how much you liked her. It’s fine now, Javi. She is fine.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I don’t. I just believe in it.’ Yuzuru stands up, nodding at his own words. He takes the drink extended at him, the condensation drops fogging the label, but the sudden iciness elicits a bout of cough and he spills some on his jacket. ‘Shit. Can I borrow your bathroom?’

‘Yes.’ The monograph hangs in the air between them until he stupidly regains the ability to construct sentences. ‘It’s next to my room, just beside the _Monet_.’

‘Show me.’ The young man places the bottle on the dining table. ‘Or are you afraid?’

It is a game, tactical and strategic, and Javier knows not if he is a pawn or the puppeteer. ‘Afraid of what?’

The gap between their faces narrows and Yuzuru coyly peeks under his long eyelashes. ‘Afraid of me.’

‘Of you?’ It is almost a déjà-vu from the beach and he can almost taste the salt crystals on the tip of his tongue and the sand on his nails. ‘Why should I be afraid of you?’

‘Of who I am.’ The intermittent expelled breath tickles Javier’s lips and he parts them slightly to devour that elixir of life. ‘Of the things you want to do to me. Of–’

It is noise, incomprehensible narratives that his impatience refuses to indulge, and Javier lunges forward, pressing their mouths together, like he had done before in the starlight brilliance, still platonic but the chastity broken as Yuzuru wraps his arms around the Spaniard’s neck, disintegrating the physical distance between their agonizing clothed bodies.

The sprint to the bathroom is almost immediate, Javier already pulling off his sweat stained shirt and tripping on his wet jeans, embarrassment slowing down his movements, if only for a few milliseconds, before the wave of arousal crumbles all his inhibition. Yuzuru is still under the restraint of his garments when he pins him against the tiles of the shower stall, another kiss on the rosy, bruised lips. He drags the zipper down with a force he might have ripped it off from the sports jacket, sliding it off the thin arms and the young man laughs with the same high pitch jest. Javier stops just to stare at the dilated pupils almost consuming the dark irises completely, the lust reflected in them his, Yuzuru’s or of the two of them, he wonders which.

The pair of hands gently tiptoeing his scalp and diving among his hazelnut strands are soft, so different from all the other strange clutches and faceless corpses, and Javier sighs at the growing desire simmering under his skin. He takes Yuzuru’s palms to his lips, peeking at the face in front of him through the space between the fingers. He feels the delicate pulse turning faster and erratic, matching with his own, when the young man subtly pulls back.

‘Please don’t.’

There are a few scars on the inside of his wrists, some long and shallow, shorter ones but the rugged ridges confess how deep they were, others spread across the arm on top of the bluish vessels. Javier brushes his lips on each one of them, a tender caress stalking their length and sucking at the sensitive wounds, until they are crimson and hurt, and Yuzuru stifles his writhing at each singular contact. The Spaniard follows the trail to armpit, the hill of the collarbones (and the tiny mole together with the discoloured, blemished marks there) and the notch below the Adam’s apple, nudging his nose on the valley and inhaling the enslaving combination of sea salt, sweat and ripe vanilla.

‘Please don’t, Javi.’

The vibrations on the throat resonate against his cheeks and he lifts his head, searching for consent from the trembling silhouette. Yuzuru shakes his, the lines of his face and dimples contorted into a mixture of shame and awakening pleasure. ‘Please don’t look at them, Javi.’

The Spaniard imitates the same negating gesture, sweeping his thumb over the cut scars the wrists. ‘You’re beautiful, Yuzuru.’ He resumes the gnawing on the fluctuating sternum, teeth scraping at the rounds buds of his nipples that toughen at the mere touch. ‘So beautiful.’ The path is downwards and he continues, the tip of his nose on the obstacles of the successive ribs, a hum synchronized with the anarchic bashing of the heart against its cage, the childlike laughter when he bites Yuzuru’s navel.

Every single piece of the puzzle of what this moment is seems to fit perfectly in place and Javier drops to his knees, not the still dry, cold cream tiles sending a shiver down his spine, but the anticipation of leading them both to zenith.

‘You don’t have to do this, Javi.’

All words are foreign to him, pleas and prayers blended into music, as he unbuckles the belt at the waist and pulls the worn out jeans to the young man’s ankles, an improvised ball and chain to restrain his movements. Javier presses his cheek on the already hardened member through the wet briefs, sweet musk and a raspy moan jolting his own confined manhood. His own fingers are quivering while he tames the savage want to yank away the underwear, to tear the fabric open, to dig his nails into his hips until he carves bleeding half moons.

Javier draws circles on Yuzuru’s satin inner thighs instead, pinching gingerly on the firm muscles there for the torturous vow of teasing when he senses the young man recline and ease at the lethargic pace. ‘Truly beautiful, Yuzuru.’ He almost jumps when takes the pink tip of the erection to his mouth, the dark-haired boy flinching at the sweltering heat around his member. He drinks of the pearly precum on his tongue, of his own saliva as he licks the vein on the underside, and Javier too moans when he engulfs the whole cock, inch by inch, until it is completely buried in him.

Yuzuru curses litanies of an angel, voice corrupted and broken by desire, trying to stay quiet and not to thrust his hips forward. It is Javier who dictates the pace, sloppy and rampageous, vagarous when sucking the slit and swift and brisk when his lips peruse the flesh. It is driving him crazy, the throbbing manhood hitting the palate and back of his throat, the pair of hands anchored at his hair, fastening at the nutty brown strands each time he goes further down, and the chants of his name, _Javier_ , _Javi_ , condensed and abbreviated as Yuzuru nears the climax, until only syllables are left, solitary vowels and then incoherent pants and gasps.

Both men chase their orgasms at the same time, the slickness of Javier’s own release flooding the lining of his briefs as he comes untouched, and Yuzuru’s semen on his mouth. He savours the whiteness as much as he can, inebriated by the bitter tang and the excess that drips to his chin. He yields the hold on the young man’s sex, the limp member sliding off casually from his swollen lips, his whole body shivering from the aftermath bliss, needles of thrill still prickling the end of his nerves for his gluttony. He slumps back on his ankles, jaws a little fatigued and the tacky heaviness at his loins reminding him of the warranted shower, but he lets himself close his eyes for brief seconds, blinded by the afterglow.

Javier smiles.

He thought the ability to enjoy the contact with another human was impossible since _that_ day. Until Yuzuru came. Until Yuzuru and the rooftop, until Yuzuru and the pair of wings that saved him from the free fall and taught him to fly.

‘Javi…’

He opens his eyes, his breathing slightly stabilized but a spasm still whimsically assaults him.

Yuzuru’s shoulders sag, lifeless, as his back crawls down the tiles and grout on the wall, his legs giving way to the pressure, and he falls onto the floor. His hands are curled into fists and his nails sink into his palms, knuckles white and bones protruding as he hammers them over and over on the shower drain. The hoarse hymns from before are now violent sobs and convulsive gasps, as tears blear his vision like raindrops in a storm. He cries Javier’s name, someone else’s name, until he is almost hysterical, and he scratches his forearm with an urgency to dislocate it from his elbow, almost cutting through the skin of his scars.

‘I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!’ Yuzuru chokes on one of his howls, the guilty lament distilling the last apology from him. ‘Please forgive me.’


	7. Part VII

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ‘Why, Yuzuru?’ The jealousy is a plague and he is already infected. ‘Why did you do it?’ 
> 
> ‘Because I wanted to live!’ A tear falls to his cheek. ‘Because I wanted to know if it was worth it! If I was worth it!’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello dear all! This chapter stepped strongly on the dark meter so please check the tags before reading. There are mentions of very unstable mental states and suicide ideation. This is in no way a chapter to discriminate or create prejudice about the topic, far from it, I wanted to explore the limits of such relationship, and I certainly understand if you feel uncomfortable with it and prefer to stop reading. 
> 
> This plot has been planned for a long time and only now I have found words to write it down, who knows how long this phase will last but I just want to let you know that writing this was very therapeutic and I thank from the bottom of my heart all the people who have supported me during this tough period. I love you all. 
> 
> Disclaimer: This is a work of FICTION! Read the tags before reading. Enjoy your ride.

Wet strands that fall over a forehead on knees, bones and cartilage drawn to the chest with a pair of hands, knuckles red from residual heat and shivering feet, bare and naked, ankles and Achille’s tendon on the cushioned sofa, Javier captures Yuzuru’s withdrawn silhouette curled into a ball, a sphere of a hollow carcass, trying to occupy the least area possible. As if he didn’t want to exist anymore.

As if he did not deserve to exist.

‘Here,’ he extends a mug, one that is slowly changing its color, from a single cream streak to a full-blown rainbow, a thermal contraption to attract wealthy tourists on a trip, ‘it’s hot chocolate. I put in some sugar too. They say it’s good for…’

For panic attacks and bundles of nerves but Javier saves these words for himself, not because he thinks they are offensive or distasteful. He doesn’t know why he stays silent, why his vocal cords are on strike for any further syllable until he receives the green light for the drink. It doesn’t have to be hot chocolate, he quickly mentally surveys the myriad of options he has on his kitchen, ground Arabica coffee from the Indonesian island of Sumatra, Chinese Jasmine blossom bags and Japanese green tea leaves, lemonade from two days ago (he hopes it’s not more than that), cans of sugar-free coke, bubble gum soda…

‘Will I get food poisoning?’ The younger man raises his head, his cheeks almost bumping into the warm cup and he takes the drink into his palms, bowing, his head drifting into a lower angle of higher shame. ‘I’m sorry for…’, the invisible ribbon of brewed, roasted cocoa reaches his nostrils, and he closes his eyes for a nanosecond, ‘… the clothes. _This_. Everything.’

Javier sits on the other padded panel of the sofa, his thigh pressing into the armrest, a fair distance between each of their frames. Both their forearms are red, faint crimson, streaks of nail scratched upon the tender patches of skin near their wrists. Near their scars.

 

_‘What are you doing, Yuzuru?!’_

_The tiles of the bathroom are cold, gelid against his knees and buttocks, freezing against his overly sensitive sex after his climax._

_‘Stop it, Yuzuru. Stop!’_

_He is not human but a beast, lost in his desperation to crawl out of the heinous skin of a pretty boy. His whole body shakes, convulses against the tiles, trashing, kicking away, his fingers dig deep into the recently healed horizontal lines right on top of the arteries and veins on his wrists, deeper, rooting in them, deeper, gauging the venom out, deeper._

_‘I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’ Deeper and deeper until they meet again. ‘I’m sorry! I don’t want this anymore! Please forgive me!’ Deeper until the whole world is red._

_‘Stop it, Yuzuru!’_

_‘You’re waiting for me, aren’t you? I’m sorry. I should have gone with you that day. I’m sorry!’_

 

Javier can still feel the grip on himself, a shiver down his spine as he remembers the sheer strength of Yuzuru’s seemingly fragile posture. It was the tap that saved them, the gush of steamed water pouring upon their heads and shoulders when he turned it on, the colossal torrent retrieving the young man back from the exasperated trance. The lemon-scented shampoo too, Javier can smell it still from their proximity, that he scrubbed onto the scalp of a then sobbing Yuzuru, clinging to his chest, the tears mixed with citrus foam until there were only hiccoughs and the same apologetic chants, repeated and reverberated against his sternum.

‘I’m sorry, Javier.’ He lifts the mug to his mouth, the chocolate barely touching his lips. ‘I didn’t mean to scare you.’

‘I’m not scared.’ His hazelnut locks, now darker like bark from an ancient oak tree, reassure him as they sway from his head shake. ‘Was it your…’, Javier turns his whole body to Yuzuru and he waits until the other man does the same, slowly, leg caught under his weight and an almost imperceptible nod for him to continue, ‘… your first time?’

‘Yes.’ And yet Yuzuru smiles pitifully at the cascading ombre shades of brown on his cup, the undissolved cocoa particles settling at the bottom, the swirls of milk marking the porcelain sides. ‘No, it was…’, he tips the mug slightly to the side, almost but not spilling the contents on the fabric of the couch or the nylon carpet, ‘… it was a long time since I was touched.’

‘Did I…’, Javier swallows the lump spreading and coating his throat, ‘… did I hurt you?’

‘No. Please no.’ The younger man chuckles instead, the sound docile and mildly teasing, a kitten’s cry. ‘It was good. _Too_ good. _He_ never made me feel like that. Not the way you did.’

It is relief when his hands release the pressure he was subconsciously applying on the handle of his own cup as Javier settles it now by the coffee table, almost knocking to the floor the crystal ashtray. It is relief and also a twitch of pleasure poking at his ribs and descending to his groin, the ghost sensation of Yuzuru’s pulsating member on his tongue, flesh on his palate, his essence dripping down his chin. He adjusts his sitting stance, shifting the ways his legs cross so he can confine his manhood further to give it no freedom to sprung free by its own volition.

‘You know,’ Yuzuru breaks the silence, a minute or two gone, ‘ _he_ wasn’t blonde.’

 

_‘What?’ He finally opens his eyes, the blindfold just now severing all the light and color from his vision gone. ‘What did you do?’_

_‘Don’t you like it, Yuzuru?’ A hand runs through the freshly washed tresses of gold, some platinum from the reflection of the LED on the ceiling, the contrast with the silver leftover strands forming an artificial halo. ‘Don’t you like me like this, Yuzuru?’_

_‘You look handsome. You will always be beautiful.’ He presses a kiss to the bleached mop of hair. ‘But why did you do it?’_

_‘We have the same eyes, the same nose, the same hair. We almost look like twins.’_

_‘We don’t.’_

_‘We do. And I don’t want that. You’re my everything, Yuzuru.’_

 

‘It was stupid of him to dye it blonde. He should have never done it.’ Javier doesn’t interrupt him, nodding as if he understood but he doesn’t, like how he doesn’t understand Yuzuru, not a millesimal part of him, except his voice, a lyre that pretends to string an elated tune with damned iterations. ‘I always believed we were creatures of the night, he and I. We were both children of the night.’

‘Born from the bastard moon.’

‘Yes. From the fatherless dusk and the stars without womb.’ It is improvised poetry and Javier raises an eyebrow to his theatrical indignance. ‘He used to say I was his darkness, all that he wished for but that he didn’t know how to hug these shadows. How to embrace me. You know Javier…’, the hot chocolate is still lukewarm and yet it collides on the inside of his mouth like shaved ice, ‘… he was my _sky_.’

‘Is this why,’ the older man has leaned forward, his whole body closer to the stranger, pulled by the gravity of their masses, ‘is this why he jumped?’

The trembling of Yuzuru’s hands is visibly noticeable, how each of his phalanges seem to try to grip and surrender the tension on the mug, how they place the recipient on the floor, his torso almost slipping in the same trajectory but stopped by his knees. He takes a deep breath, oxygen being poison instead, barbed on the throat, caustic on the eyes, summoning a watery veil on his irises.

‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked that. It was dumb. I’m–’

‘He didn’t jump.’ The digital clock on the shelf above the TV set beeps once for the arrival of midnight. ‘I was the one who pushed him.’

And he stares at Javier, a pair of obsidians searching for the marron ones without any shortcut or deviance in the path. He gouges and drills into their shared sight, smirks and grins gone, only a face, cheeks and bottom lip caught between the front teeth, daring the Spaniard to flee, to say he is afraid he will be the next victim. He dares him to escape the guillotine before the blade strikes his neck.

And Javier stares back, a pair of almonds on the bottomless void without once blinking or peering beyond the window where the moon dew bathes over Yuzuru’s exposed nape. He locks and fastens himself in their shared gaze, smirks and grins gone too, only a face, stubble unshaved from the morning and tongue wetting his bottom lip, replying to the mute challenge, that no, the he is not afraid, that he wants and he will dive into the depths of his core where he is drowning so he can catch him before he jumps too.

‘You are so stupid, _Javi_. Like them. Like _he_ was.’ He only nods, waiting for Yuzuru to gather the words hung in the cupboard of his thoughts, the fabrics torn and the outfits missing a piece. ‘We met on children’s day last year, when they organized the balloon paint fight on the mural in the central park. The West one.’

‘The one with the talking mushrooms. They requested us to repaint that atrocity.’

‘We did _that_.’ Yuzuru’s weaves an imaginary brush in front of him, as if air was a canvas and their breathing ink. ‘Ugly, yes, but we did it together. I had never done anything with anyone. And he was there, pants already full of chalk powder and diluent bubbles. I don’t know why but…’, he squeezes his palm, the brush gone that same second, ‘… but I just knew he was the same as I was. And he knew it too. I looked at him and I knew he had been waiting for me all that time.’

‘What?’ He already knows the answer and yet he wants to hear it. ‘What were you?’

‘Monsters.’ They both gasp at the same time, of shame and guilt, of excitement and intoxicating hysteria. ‘We were monsters, Javi, hidden beneath this disguise of human skin. We bleed when hurt but what runs in our vessels is…’

… is curdled depravity and what it feeds them is the disgust for the good, Javier supplies the rest of the statement, the symbiotic understanding tingling the end of his nerves with ecstasy, more powerful than any potent drug. He knows now, no, he always knew why he desired Yuzuru so much – to quench the thirst for his vanilla kisses and his heat camouflaged in thorns that prickled when they accidentally touched.

He too is a monster.

‘We were _normal_ in the beginning, he and I, just how they wanted us to be.’ The young man leans into the cushioned softness, the loose, borrowed T-shirt sagging on his slender chest and exposing a few healed spots on his collarbones. ‘We only kissed when no one could see us but he would hold my hand wherever we went to. He smoked and I learned to do it because I wanted to enjoy the things he did, but he hated all the brands out there. They mix it with cow shit, he used to say.’

Javier laughs, his eyes glancing at the almost empty cigarette packet on his coffee table and the remnants of ashes in the receptacle. They do sometimes make him want to vomit.

‘So he stole them from his father. Not all the time. Maybe one or two every week so that hog wouldn’t notice. They were still bad, but he liked them. We would sit on the floor of the sculpture pantry. I hate the smell of plaster, you know, burnt plastic mixed with rotting meat, but no one would come on Friday’s afternoons.’

‘I go there too.’ Javier pretends to flick a lighter and blows a puff of an illusion, water vapor, carbon dioxide and his breath of milk cocoa. ‘The fire alarm is broken there. Someone deactivated it.’

‘ _He_ did it so we wouldn’t be caught. He knew the Academy like a Lego tower, floor by floor, piece by piece, where it was the sturdiest, where it would crack and crumble. He knew everything and he wanted to try them all. Not just cigarettes, Javier, money too. He would exchange a few of his small bills, when he received his payment from tutoring primary children. He would slip them in his father’s wallet and swap them with the ones with a few more zeros in them. It was his reward, the compensation for being the perfect son.’

‘Did the principal believe him?’ Javier stretches his leg, the rough skin of the sole of his foot whisking over the other man’s toes.

‘Of course not.’ Yuzuru doesn’t shy away from the caress. ‘Everyone knew the truth. They can smell the monster in us from miles away. But he didn’t care. I didn’t care. Everyone knew we were together and they pretended everything was normal.’

‘And so he continued.’

He nods. ‘We tried all the expensive bottles in the convenience stores, vodkas, absinthe, the fake French champagne _a la brut_ , we made cocktails that would put professional bartenders in night clubs to shame, cheap beer with gin and caramel, hot sake poured on yogurt ice-cream. He would get so drunk, Javier, so drunk, and laugh, laugh the whole night until we couldn’t sing anymore. We once woke up in the tunnel near the bridge, soaked in our sweat and who knows what else. And when alcohol wasn’t enough, because nothing is ever enough, we ran.’

‘You ran?’ The Spaniard pulls him closer, just a little, enough for ankles to meet with knees. Limbs interlaced in its respective arches. ‘Where did you go?’

‘Everywhere and anywhere.’ A faint hiss escapes the dark-haired man’s lips when he feels a hand trailing the smooth scar on his inner thigh. ‘We ran through the whole city, sprinting not jogging, we ran the marathon, we ran up walls and fences with sharp-toothed dogs, we rushed through red lights. He loved it so much, that feeling of almost being hit by a car, when the headlights shine right on your face and the deer becomes a monster that bares its jaws.’

 

_‘What?’_

_‘Just a box, Yuzuru.’ There are numerous squared labels, blue and red, with raised dots and lubricant included, thin, stretchy, thick with peppery fieriness, XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL, for the most adventurous, for the less daring but more enamoured, for the one-night standers, for the faithful affair jugglers._

_‘We can’t do this. What if they catch us?’ He is smiling though, his fingertip charting the plastic packaging film around each of the cartons._

_‘C’mon, my Yuzuru, just one.’_

_‘Which one?’_

_‘Which one do you want?’_

_‘Which one will make you more comfortable?’_

_‘On me? Or on you?’_

_‘On the two of us.’_

 

‘We would lift things from shops, pears, a carton of strawberry milkshake, nail polish. We knew that cameras could easily capture us so I would return them all the next day or the same day before the shops closed. All of them except for…’, the almost dry fringe falls over his eyelashes and Yuzuru tucks it behind his ear.

‘Except for?’

‘The condoms.’ He raises his hand, staring at the lines of his palm. ‘He wanted to try them and I let him. First it was just my fingers, just for the tasting ceremony, the tutti-frutti mix, pineapple, peach. The coconut and the chocolate, he insisted, were on me.’

Javier grabs the extended hand, bringing the young man’s long fingers to his mouth. ‘On you?’ He engulfs the middle digit, dragging his tongue down until the space between the knuckles, the flavour not of fruit or pastry, but vanilla, sophisticatedly burnt.

‘Yes.’ Yuzuru watches the pink tip circle the skin, saliva coating the print marks and teeth gnawing on the flesh. ‘He would take me on his knees, so full that I thought he would choke. He would say I was all the banquets of this world and all the delicacies of his dreams.’

‘I love your taste Yuzuru.’

‘He didn’t have much experience, but you Javier…’, he retrieves his hand, guilt and pleasure both colliding in the tremors of his arms, ‘… you are much better. So good, Javier, I never want to leave your mouth.’ The young man recedes instead of giving in to the caress. ‘That’s why we can’t. I can’t do this to you.’

‘Why not? What is missing? The danger? The danger of being found?’

‘The feeling of being alive.’

‘What?’

‘We wanted to be alive. Hearts beating and lungs not corrupted. We were dead monsters trapped inside a functioning body. I hated it. He hated it too. We just wanted to be alive.’ The silence is restored, only their shallow breathing mingling in the particles of dust and the occasional gusts hitting the windowpanes. ‘But it soon wasn’t enough.’

‘Not enough?’ Javier leans forward again, not caring if the other man retreats to his corner, an urge in him to salvage the glint in his eyes before it subsided perpetually to the abyss. He stops a few inches from his neck, the Adam’s apple throbbing at the intimidation, the minuscule marks of half-moons and imperfect blemishes clear where they started and where they ended. ‘Did you go further?’

Yuzuru nods, tears gathering upon his eyelid, dousing his irises in a crystalline pool. ‘His father one day caught him with cigars on his pockets and almost broke his arm. The bruise was like a charcoal stain all over his elbow. I told him to go to a physician but he liked it. It was a flower, born from our dark seeds and he wore it with pride.’

 

_‘Please, you have to check it.’_

_‘No!’ He pressed Yuzuru against the back of the sofa, legs pinning his hips until he couldn’t move. ‘It’s so beautiful Yuzuru. I want it as a tattoo. I want it to stay forever. I want it on you.’ He clenches his hand over the dark tresses, until his fingers descend to the throat and he forces all his strength onto the windpipe._

_‘Please.’ Yuzuru chokes, his vision blurring and needles stabbing under his tongue and palate._

_‘Shhh. It’s alright. I will be alright.’ He releases his hold, hugging the sobbing man in his embrace. ‘It’s so beautiful, Yuzuru. The red on your white skin. You’re so beautiful, Yuzuru.’_

 

‘It stayed for one week.’ He drags the round collar of the shirt down until the notch of his collarbones. ‘He loved purple. It was his favorite color. I loved it too.’

‘And this?’ Javier turns his wrists up, the healed scar marred with his outburst in the shower. There is anger in his words, a sickening madness of wanting to protect the stranger that asked for one more day. ‘Did he also do this?’

‘Yes. We did it.’ _Never leave me, Yuzuru._ ‘Blood on blood.’ _It’s our pact, Yuzuru._

‘Why, Yuzuru?’ The jealousy is a plague and he is already infected. ‘Why did you do it?’

‘Because I wanted to live!’ A tear falls to his cheek. ‘Because I wanted to know if it was worth it! If I was worth it!’

 

_‘Tian?’ The smell of sterile alcohol is strong and it’s everywhere, the pillow, the bedsheets, the ceiling, on his hands, in his liver, in his spleen, in his brain._

_‘Yuzuru?’_

_‘Tian? Where are you?’ He opens his yes only to close them immediately, the fluorescent light too menacing for a welcome._

_‘I’m here, Yuzuru. I’m here. I won’t leave you.’ He kisses the bandaged wrists, a delicate touch of lips but passionate like it was the last thing he would ever kiss in his life. ‘I will never leave you. Please tell me you won’t leave me.’_

 

‘They called his parents and mine.’ Yuzuru wipes the drop, salt on his tongue, and he is suddenly so small, almost nothing, just a boy lost in the world, a vagabond travelling between parallel dimensions. ‘They even called a psychiatrist. That man knew nothing, only disorders and illnesses from books that he had never read and cheques from pharmaceutical companies on his pocket. He knew nothing, Javier. Nothing. He didn’t understand us. He didn’t. No one did, Javier. No one.’

‘I do, Yuzuru. I do.’

‘Do you?’

Javier smiles, tenderly, crimson roots already ramifying in his eyes as he fondles the stranger’s other cheek, the one not yet soaked by his cries. He stays in that position, for seconds, minutes, even hours had he know how to chase time, in the mute quietness of his broken voice, and Yuzuru nudges closer, smiling too.

‘You do, Javi, but they didn’t. They asked me questions in the morning and he in the afternoon. The same threats and same disappointment. We didn’t utter a word. They only wanted the answers they wanted to hear and not what we had to tell. The hospital was not good, they said. Our homes neither. And we ran again.’

Javier doesn’t know if the terror in the young man’s irises are his or the reflection of his own. He knows how the story ends, the spoilers always arriving before the plot finishes, but he still asks. Perhaps history could be changed if one really wished for it. ‘Where did you go?’

‘To the Academy.’ It is almost a whisper. ‘To the rooftop.’

 

_‘We can go anywhere, only the two of us.’ He can’t breathe, the cut from the IV catheter still hurting, and he can barely stand from the exodus of stairs. ‘Please.’_

_‘No, no, no. They will take you away from me!’ He kisses Yuzuru, hard until it bruises, despair laced in his own tears, cold, sluggish, sentience departing from him with each renewal of lips. ‘I’m tired of all the positive lists. I’m tired of their fake faces telling me I’m crazy. I’m not! Lunatic, psycho, insane, but I’m not any of that, Yuzuru!’ He hops away, hands on the railing, the distance to the ground not so far anymore. ‘I’m tired of the morphine, of the lithium, of all the things they inject on my brain. They don’t feed me food but all these chemicals. I’m a machine! I’m not human, Yuzuru! They took everything away from me! They made me a monster!’_

_‘You have me!’ He trips on the gap between the concrete slabs, the pain of the impact not registered yet. ‘You promised me!’_

_‘I won’t leave you, Yuzuru. I won’t go far.’ He looks back one last time, a serene smile as he opens his chest, arms wide and saluting the night. ‘I only want to fly.’_

_And he jumped._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story mentions someone named 'Tian'. I won't allude it further to whom the name might belong because I love the idea of someone being named 'Sky' but I also know that people might associate it with Boyang. I leave it to you reader, to make the decision of who you want to associate it with.


	8. Part VIII

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If one day I can be reborn as a human, I hope I can see you again. 
> 
> Thank you, Javier. 
> 
> Please keep on living.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dear all, thank you for all the support so far! Shitty days are definitely much better because of you <3 So there is one more chapter until this is finished. I will miss this plot. 
> 
> Disclaimer: This is a work of FICTION! By chapter 8, this must be very clear already.

_‘Hey Yuzuru, do you think anyone would miss us if we disappeared?’ He draws a few circles with his pinky finger, imperfect and curved lines that don’t close on the young man’s naked navel._

_‘I would miss you.’ Yuzuru swats the hand away playfully, trying to contain a fit of laughter. ‘I would miss you a lot.’_

_‘I will never leave you, Yuzuru. I can’t live without you.’ The finger returns to the firm muscles below the belly button, the thumb trailing just under the elastic of the waistband, twirling a few pubic hairs. ‘I would choose to die if I couldn’t have you.’_

_He bites back a moan. ‘Do you think you can die when you are already dead?’_

_‘I’m alive.’ The pulse on the wrists matches the throbbing of his manhood. ‘I’m alive only when with you, Yuzuru.’_

_‘What if I died tonight or tomorrow? Or the next day?’ The young man opens his legs wider, his thighs welcoming the heat of ferocious hips._

_‘I won’t let you die. You will live forever.’_

_‘Until the end of time?’_

_‘Until the end of time.’_

 

 

‘It happened so fast. So quick! It was…’, Yuzuru’s voice is a ghost of how Javier remembers it, the cadence of the major chord shifting to a minor and some of the notes are missing between the breaths he skips as the torrent of tears cascades from his eyes, ‘… so fast Javi. Why? Why did he do it? Why? It was just a second. A second! He didn’t even say goodbye.’ He almost chokes on his sobs, his speech the scratched backtrack of a vintage CD, virtually broken but refusing to dive into the oblivion. ‘Why? It was… it was so… he jumped. He jumped! Without m-me!’

‘Yuzuru–’ The Spaniard almost falls back with the strength of the fists hammering his chest.

‘Without me! He jumped without me! I would have jumped with him, Javi!’ The gasps for air are apparent now, a bout of cough that might as well rip apart his lungs into lumps of decayed meat, spit drying on his tongue. ‘I would have jumped too!’

‘Please, Yuzuru.’

‘We had a promise! We should have jumped together. I should have jumped with him.’ He stops for a few seconds, irises widening at the sudden realization, and the pair of obsidians, deep from the core of the earth, stares at Javier. They could vault out of the sockets with its fury and despair. ‘No. No. No, no, no.’ He shakes his head, a few tears falling to both their laps, boiling the moment it touches skin, freezing the moment they evaporate. ‘I should have saved him. I should have jumped instead of him. Yes. I should have. Am I right, Javi? It should have been _me_!’

‘No, Yuzuru. Please.’ The older man is crying too, the saline drops stinging his eyes. He doesn’t know if they are blinding him or if it is the pain that contaminates him and trifle him like a marionette of severed twines. ‘No, you’re wrong. So wrong. Please.’

‘NO!’ The volume lowers. ‘I should have…’, the string of words fades with the dance of the hands of the clock, ‘please…’, it is a weak plea, not even a whisper, ‘… _please_.’ The young man opens his mouth but all sound is consumed by his gasps, the walls of his throat closing as if glued with cello tape, locked with a golden key already thrown to another galaxy to be forever not found. ‘P-please… I can’t–’

It is only a grain of sand that falls from the hourglass, a distant cousin of the linear time, or so Javier thinks when he notices the spreading paleness on the young man’s face, beneath the flushed cheeks of rose. His lips complement the spectrum with its outwardly hues of indigo and purple, parted, shivering. He is drowning in his own ocean of fear, of barren waters, and he can’t float, only sink, and he can’t swim, only flail his arms, down and only down.

‘Breathe, Yuzuru.’ Javier orders him but he is ingrained to the cushioned panel of the sofa, appalled, not heeding to anything except the commitment to emptiness of his soul. Of all souls. ‘Please, Yuzuru. You have to listen to me.’

‘… No… Let me…’

‘Shh. Don’t talk.’ He grabs Yuzuru’s hand, gently yet firm (what if it slipped to somewhere he can’t reach?), and he lays it on top of his own chest, right in the middle of his ribcage, where both their palms can feel the sporadic rhythm of his heart, perhaps a little too hastened, but he inhales deeply, restoring the _andante_ metronome. ‘Don’t talk. Don’t do anything. Just…’, he presses their foreheads together, closing his eyes when Yuzuru does the same per instinct, ‘… just be here.’

Javier doesn’t know if the air between the two of them is enough, if he is the one drinking of the volatile pants on the swollen lips he kissed until they were no longer strangers, or if it is Yuzuru who is feeding of their shared oxygen. He smells of lemon shampoo and freshly mowed lawn, of lemongrass too and meadows of vanilla blossoms. He smells of the rain from the north, from autumn clouds drifting in the sky in conglomerates of cotton flowers, of showers from the south too, that drenches the brick walls of his own apartment, like how the tears slide down his eyelids to the smooth dimples of his cheeks. He smells of leftover charcoal on the canvas that smear onto his fingertips when he draws the city lights of the nightscape, and of gouache and watercolor mixed in the same palette, undiluted, the matte shades soaking into the pulp sheets when the horizon bathes in the butterscotch sunrise. Yuzuru smells of everything that Javier loves, even now when he leans back just a little, just enough for their sights to recover from the blurriness of their proximity, just enough for their dazed consciousness to anchor back on their feeble limbs.

The colors around the room shift in kaleidoscopic negatives, the neon blue filling their faces in the fluorescent light, then pink and green, a yellow that is almost egg yolk and metallic again, a night of discotheque luminescence but mute, their hearts a DJ that has taken its leave, until reality settles on Javier’s drowsy mind when Yuzuru cups his jaws with his shaking fingers, muttering a barely audible ‘are you alright?’

‘Yes,’ the Spaniard nods and adjusts the way his legs cross, a tingling numbness already attacking his nerves, ‘your hot chocolate is not hot anymore.’

He nods too, not bothering though to check the forgotten mug on the table. ‘What do you want from me, Javi?’

Javier would be lying if he said he knew the answer, the exact same question pondering on his skull since that day on the rooftop. ‘I don’t know.’ His teeth collide and he almost bites his own tongue. ‘I want nothing, Yuzuru, but I keep coming to you. I’m a monster too and monsters are drawn to monsters.’

‘You are not…’, the young man matches their gazes, his thumb lifting his face by the chin, a softened smile on his lips, ‘… you are a fool, Javi. You should have run away. I should have never come.’

‘No.’ He leans forward, their mouths meeting for a chaste contact. ‘Please don’t go. Please stay.’

 

 

_Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering higher and higher, further and further into the forest, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, only myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man._

_No, I do not have any uncertainty now. I do know now. I was wrong for I thought I had dreamt of being a butterfly. I am a butterfly and my dream was about being a man. But a man I am not and will never be. I longed to walk on two feet, to jump on the summer fields of golden wheat, and for hands to hold a rose to my bosom. But a man I am not and so to a beast I return. I spread my wings, drenched in nothingness, and I rip apart these cumbersome veined leaves. I fly, even just for brief seconds, and I fall, my precious wish, to where my dream will never be true._

 

 

Javier has no idea how many hours have passed since he drifted into a tear-induced slumber. His whole body is stiff, joints cracking from the contorted position of the arms and legs, his own and Yuzuru’s, the young man laying on his lap, head safely tucked on the depression of his collarbones, back to chest. His muscles ache from the pressure of their weights but he doesn’t disrupt this combination of comforting silence and synchronized breathing. He doesn’t know if it is still the same day or another one, or even if it is a week or a month later. The room is still dark, less, still night, almost over, not yet dawn, almost there. The single streak of moonlight that penetrates the curtains sets over Yuzuru’s hair, the celestial dust a sharp contrast to his black tresses. He feels the young man’s nails grazing over his arm, up to the inside of his elbow and stumbling down to his wrists, where his own scars are.

‘Go back to sleep. It’s still early.’ Yuzuru whispers, throat dry and coarse, as he feels a hand treading through his scalp and playing with the few unruly strands.

‘You’re not sleeping either.’

‘I don’t sleep. I cannot sleep.’

‘I don’t sleep too.’

‘Liar.’ The stranger points at a spot on the opposite wall, just a random place in the unknown shadows. ‘What time is it?’

‘I don’t know.’ He really doesn’t. ‘Who cares about it anyway?’

Javier leans slightly forward, pain shooting through his neck from the strange angle it had been on the armrest, and he hisses at the needles prickling the back of his head, his forehead, his temples. It is Yuzuru who hums a serenade of a couple of notes until the cramps perish, a lullaby that wakes all his dormant senses instead of nursing him back to Morpheus’ realm. The tiptoeing dance on the arm continues and he presses a quick kiss on drumming arteries, feeling the pulse.

‘You are alive, Javi. Don’t ever forget that.’

‘And you, Yuzuru? Are you alive?’

The pitiful chuckle at his lips is all the Spaniard hears and he was never an expert at riddles, especially when the enigma was shaped as a man of pale complexion and carnation lips.

‘Did you…’, he pauses, wondering if he should ask, the curiosity burning in his mind like a splinter that needs to be plucked, until the mop of dark hair nods in allowance, ‘… did you ever loved him?’

‘Maybe.’ One second. ‘Maybe I did.’ Four seconds. ‘Maybe I did when we were together. When we were reckless and the world was fun.’ Ten seconds. ‘But it doesn’t matter anymore.’

‘It doesn’t matter?’

‘Isn’t each moment, _this_ moment more important?’ Yuzuru turns around, carefully, afraid he might knead into the Spaniard’s gut and accidentally knock the essence out of him. He drapes his arms over the broad shoulders until they are on the same eye level, each of their reflections mirrored in their irises. ‘To be here with you, isn’t this more important?’

It is, he nods. It is all that he can think at the advent of dawn as the tangerine dye of the lethargic sun spreads across the wooden flooring. It is all that he wishes for, now and the seconds that are to arrive promptly, but not too soon, when his hand brushes the fringe away from the young man’s obsidians. It is all that he hopes for when he nibbles on the earlobe, on the inward curve of the helix with the leftover hole of a piercing, and the shudder that he sows from the slender body. It is all that he begs for when their mouths collide by accident, lips scarcely touching, as if they were kissing for the first time, two children experimenting a new game, until they suddenly grow into adulthood and the taste of maturity heightens their addiction for more.

It is not a sprint race, the shackles of time broken by their wills, but a slow tasting of tongues, of savouring the vanilla and lemon, leftover cocoa on the palate, breaths stolen when they refuse to part their lips, saved by the gaps of their tenuous smiles. The liminality of day and night is the chilliest moment on the calendar and yet their hands ruffle through the hems of their shirts, diving beneath the thin fabrics, searching, the firm muscles of their torsos pressed until there isn’t a single patch of skin that is not touching when they pull the garments away, shoved to the ends of the sofa and to the ground immediately after.

The tiny moles on Yuzuru’s shoulders are Impressionist blotches and Javier kisses them to learn of the technique of the masters, tender, one by one, on the notch of his collarbones, the Cubist shapeless burnt mark on his sternum, the minimalistic pink buds of his nipples. The young man still flinches when the first stirs of pleasure are divulged in his shallows whimpers but it is Javier who jolts almost to a sitting posture when svelte fingers, cold, submerges into the waistband of his briefs, teasing, pressing in tentative nudges, join the tip of their erections, wet, leaking onto each other.

‘Yuzuru, p-please–’

‘Shh…’, the dark-haired man sinks into the cushioned panels with his knees, straddling him, lifting his own hips as he guides Javier’s manhood between his thighs, ‘… don’t talk.’

The friction is unbearably sluggish when he enters Yuzuru, unprepared and tight, too tight, the heat almost consuming him instantly, scorching his bones until they turned to ashes. He feels the descending motion, inch by inch, deeper into him, the silken walls engulfing and caging him so he can’t escape, he doesn’t want to escape, deeper, sweltering, eating him alive. He cries of the pain, Yuzuru too, as he sits, completely filled, the sound of their moan echoing in the living room, but the latent lust gouges their sex, bittersweet, inundating their tears with bliss.

‘Javi… Javi… _Javi_ …’, his name is chanted as a sensual mantra, each syllable exalted by the high-pitched yelps on the young man’s lips as he moves just slightly, ‘Javi… please. _Please_.’

Yuzuru glows, of the remnants of moon dew and astral dust, of drops of sweat that drizzle on his bobbing Adam’s apple down to his wispy waist, or so he thinks because the fog of pleasure is blinding him, until he closes his eyes, and it is still Yuzuru his mind envisions, tongue out and licking his bottom lip, cock throbbing and swelling.

He almost can’t breathe.

‘So good. So _good_ , Javier.’ The Spaniard nods, mouth agape, his throat hoarse from his own sobs, _please don’t stop_. ‘I can feel you Javi. All of you. So good. You’re in me… so huge… please… stay inside.’ He relinquishes all control, every single cell of his body at his mercy, to gamble, to play with, _please don’t leave me_. ‘I only want you, Javi.’

He comes unrestrained and hard, the muscles excruciatingly contracting at his navel, the desperate sigh dragging as he releases the ribbons of white on the young man’s tightness, his member buried to the hilt, ridden to the highest euphoria he has ever experienced, shaking, quavering in the after tremors of bliss, of fulfilled mirth. He winces when the embers free his oversensitive sex, but a pair of lips latches onto his, kissing, the tenderness of the first time and the urgency of the last one blended into the same caress, kissing, greedier and rapacious, devouring all the air he needs. A teardrop on his cheek is the last thing he remembers before he passes out.

‘You’re not a monster, Javier.’

 

 

The annoying monophonic beeps of the alarm clock are roars of thunder and he stretches his arm to the side, the back of the couch, the other side, empty, nothing, further and further out, until he leans too much and he falls to the floor, nose diving into the carpet, dirt on his mouth, a ceremonial _fuck_ and _shit_ greeting the silence in his apartment. He opens his eyes, the light of the day too strong after the love making, and he lifts himself by the elbows, sliding the pointer on his phone until it shuts up.

The love making.

He runs a hand through his naked chest, tacky with sweat and dry semen, heat pooling at his groins by the remembrance of Yuzuru’s moans.

Yuzuru.

He looks forward, then left, no clothes next to him, to the right, no ghost of another presence.

Yuzuru.

Where is Yuzuru?

Javier quickly stands up, the rapid motion muddling his senses, but he steps out, the corners of his house known to him even if blindfolded. The bottles of shampoo and shower gel are in the same place as last night, _Effie’s_ bowls still lavished with flaky tuna and clean water, the plate of scrambled eggs intact and unappetizing as a week’s long stale loaf of bread. The grip on the walls of his stomach is forceful and it almost hurts the intensity at which his heart batters on his ribs when he sees a folded piece of paper on the coffee table, a stain of chocolate on one of the corners. His hand trembles, his entire body jitters as he reads the beautiful cursive handwriting.

_Javi,_

_Please don’t feel guilty when you read this. I should have never come to you. It was my mistake, not yours, Javi. It was my mistake to want to feel alive again. And I did. You made me feel like I was human, Javi. You made me feel so good. But there are no ways to save a monster. I have learned since that time that people are born to be lonely and that I can never be saved. Please forgive Javier. I never wanted to hurt you. I have to go. I know it is my time to fly now. Don’t worry, Javi, you will forget me soon, like everyone else did._

_Please forget me._

_If one day I can be reborn as a human, I hope I can see you again._

_Thank you, Javier._

_Please keep on living._

He puts on the tossed shirt underneath the table over his head and arms, the jeans and scattered trainers on his way out, and Javier runs, keys and phone left behind, only the written note now crumbling under his palm, to the only place he can think of.

The rooftop.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Butterfly Dream Parable is a famous Taoist parable by the Chinese Philosopher Zhuangzi that basically questions what we think of as reality and what we think of as illusion.


	9. Part IX

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ‘Who do you think you are, Yuzuru?!’ 
> 
> The air feels weightless. 
> 
> What else do you want me to be? ? I can be anything you want Javier. 
> 
> The air tastes of nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *coughs* Dear all, I was supposed to finish this with nine parts but decided to divide this last chapter into two parts because I can't sit for too long in front of a pc and because there is too much emotional package for me to digest at once, so my initial plan of making this ten chapters long is back. I haven't written for some time so please be gentle *bows to you all*
> 
> Disclaimer: The usual. This is a work of fiction with heavy themes. Please check the tags before you read. 
> 
> Please enjoy!

_Javi,_

_Please don’t feel guilty when you read this. Please don’t feel anything when you read this. Nothing. That’s how it should be because there is nothing that someone can feel for me. There is nothing a monster should ever receive. I should have known this when we met that day. No, I knew it. I knew it so clearly that there isn’t a minute I am not reminded that I should have never existed. It was a mistake, you and me. No, I was the mistake. I am the mistake. I am the virus that will only corrupt people because that is what a parasite does. It steals the essence of the host, thinking it will gain a life of its own but when there is no more life to take, it dies. When there is nothing else to destroy, it withers, like it should have in the first place._

_Please forget me, Javi. Like everyone else did. We are all born crying, not because we try the air for the first time, but because we already know the pain of our lonely and miserable existence. We all seek refuge from the solitary confinement of our souls but I have never found mine. To be honest, I don’t believe in it. I don’t believe in redemption and salvation because there is nothing that can save me. This is not punishment either, Javi. This is nothing because there is nothing in this world too. I am nothing and to nothing I will return. Soon my name will be erased from every book and record, and my face will be just a blurred stain on the mirror. The world doesn’t need to remember monsters._

_Monsters like me._

_You are not a monster, Javi._

_Please forgive me._

_Please live._

 

 

The streets seem to have gained a few more miles, a few more rows of acid rain dilapidated building facades with rusty neon signs of night clubs and karaoke bars, some intersections leading to new destinations appearing on a GPS screen suddenly as per magic of some urban jack hammer fairy, and colossal successions of lamp posts, broken bulbs, glitching ones, recently replaced LEDs of a spectrum of white and cream. The streets seem to never end now that Javier runs, a maze of concrete pavements and asphalt roads in a city that he knew with his eyes closed, the blueprint imprinted in his mind, and yet he turns and turns, the school never in sight, the second time he sees the silhouette of the two men in the missionary position by the fourth floor on the apartment on his left, the third time he sees the same skeletal dog, a stray between a Doberman and a German Shepherd rampaging the leftover bones in the bin for recycled aluminium cans on the alley of the back door of posh, anorectic people’s restaurants.

It is the tenth time, the twentieth, Javier doesn’t count anymore, that he sees the same traffic light by the crossroad, even at distance, perpetually stuck on the crimson color for pedestrians, and so he keeps running, because he cannot stop, he should not stop, he must not stop. He bumps into a towering man in a badly pressed suit and reeking of spilled, cheap beer and sweat cologne, on a girl still in school uniform, the skirt pulled so high that the laced hem of her underwear can be seen, and he crosses the street, the front lights of the orange and yellow taxi almost colliding at him.

‘Hey fucker! Do you have death wish?’ The driver flashes the middle finger, yelling as the wheels screech with the impromptu brake. ‘You piece of scum! Shit!’

Javier has never run so fast in his life and he now understands why Yuzuru did it. Even with his lungs almost bursting from the excruciating pounding of his heart against his ribcage so that his blood doesn’t coagulate and choke him, the oxygen crystallizing and clogging his windpipe, the carbon dioxide poisoning him through the vessels, the skin, the tissues, Javier has never felt more liberated than now, in this race against time. Time, that was never his friend, not when he was a toddler and it made him fall more than he could walk, not when he was in his childhood years and it made him shorter than all his other primary level colleagues, not in his adolescence and much less now as the clouds overhead flutter in the same direction of the wands of a clock, the tickling of the imminent dawn being the executioner upon Yuzuru’s neck.

No.

He will not allow it.

No.

There is nothing else that he ever wanted so much in his life.

No.

He runs.

_No._

Javier has never run so fast in his life and he will keep running still, until time bows its head in defeat and it cradles him to its bosom. And he will lean against it, the smell of all the eons and epochs gone entrenched in his sweat-wet t-shirt, the seas of the first ice age and the peaks of the mountains before the widespread deserts of golden sand. He will be time, now and beyond. Because…

… how can he save Yuzuru if he loses this bet with time?

And perhaps time does have ears after all, after all the seconds of people on their knees praying to gods without faces and names without spellings, minutes of forests charring by capitalists starving for a noose of vivid cash to strangle them even after death, the hours of bullets being fired from rifles carried by crying children on armies of demons riding tanks and hiding on trenches, because time concedes a breach in a lifetime, an aperture so tight it is impossible to notice, just enough for Javier to finally run towards a street that is not the same as the ones before, the Academy standing in front of him, in the same place it has always been.

The school is closed, like all the other private commercial buildings, gates tall and fences high, a few of the metallic bars starting to oxidize with the damp humidity of the air while the smell of fresh paint is ever rich on others, though not locked, and Javier pushes through with negligent care, unafraid if the hinges could eventually break. A few of the rooms in the ground floor are dimly illuminated behind the thin curtains of cheap plastic, the ventilation fans presently in power saving mode, and he almost knocks the janitor to the floor. Mr. Joker as they call him, he remembers, the middle-aged man always wore checked and colored socks even with leather shoes, but Javier only nods in a silent apology, his legs unable to stop and already skipping a few steps on the ascension of stairs.

Javier has never run so fast in his life and he is tired. So tired. His toes are cramping with each jump up, the muscles on his hamstrings beg for a rest no matter how short it is, his lungs burn from the insufficient supply of oxygen and the overheated blood that reaches the alveoli. His arms are shaking, like all his shivering body, the escalating fever of lack of time asphyxiating him.

He is going to die.

Another step and the art teacher trips, his right knee hitting the edge of the tread, both his palms acting as physical brakes to stop the bridge of his nose embracing the impact. It hurts. It hurts so much, the knee, the cuts near his wrists, the grand finale of the drums in his ears as time mockingly laughs at him. Javier screams. Once. Loud and guttural, a human turned into a mad beast, until a single tear slides to the corner of his mouth and he tastes the salty poison, the sodium from all the seas and oceans combined in that drop, the tang becoming bitter – is this how defeat tasted?

Is this how Yuzuru is going to die?

He almost closes his eyes, resigned and beaten, this world is a place where things will never be yours the more you try to control them, the ghosts fiercer the more you exorcise them, and emotions sting harder the more you try to smooth them, when a door, a metallic door, the heavy door to the rooftop forever wailing, like a mistress waiting for her drowned sailor to return from the tempest, close with an amicable thud. There is someone up there.

Javier has never run so fast, again, because he knows times plays dirty but he will not yield to the childish taunt anymore.

Someone who hasn’t jumped yet.

_Yuzuru._

‘Yuzuru!’

The night is cold, the promise of the wind arriving the exact moment he steps outside, and his calling is almost eaten by the clouds above and picked by the hidden stars. The concrete marking on the floor are the same as he remembers on that day when they both sat side by side, both wanting to end something they knew they were willing to, but know he thanks the sky for the rain that stopped them. He walks closer, the dryness of his throat threatening to rip apart his vocal cords as he shouts to the young man on the verge of the building, already on the other side of the protective railing.

‘Who do you think you are, Yuzuru?!’ He pulls out a crumpled piece of paper, the letter left on his coffee table. ‘What is this? Why did you write this? What were you thinking?’

‘Javier–’

His own name barely leaves the lips of the younger man and Javier feels the anger pooling at each crease of his ribcage finally leak to the surface. ‘Why are you so stupid, Yuzuru? I hate this. I hate these kinds of jokes!’ He drags his leaden feet, an executioner walking to the criminal. ‘Why did you play with me? Why? You want me to forgive you but I won’t. I won’t! Listen to me, Yuzuru!’ He rips the wrinkled paper to small, tiny chunks, and throws them to the shortening space between them. The midnight breeze gnaws a few of the fragments, the temporary white shower anything but comforting. ‘Those were lies. All lies. Lies! You are so selfish, Yuzu. All you are doing is repeating what Tian did. What he didn’t want you to ever experience. You are selfish, Yuzuru. Too selfish. And a coward. You are a coward. You–’

‘I AM!’ The sudden response from Yuzuru shatters the filter of fury and ire, and Javier finally notices the dishevelled black hair, the reddened eyes that keep crying, the whitening knuckles gripping the railing. The young man is nothing but a child that moment, lost and afraid to go to a home that doesn’t exist anymore, a withering bud trampled without being given the chance to even blossom. ‘I am. Selfish and coward. Is this what you want me to say? Is this what you want to hear?’

‘Yuzuru–’

‘I am selfish. I am a coward. What else do you want me to be? A fucking chicken who runs at the first whip? I can be anything you want Javier. You don’t understand. You never understood. You should have never come here that day. Why did you have to ruin it? Why did you have to stop me?’

‘Why do you want to die so much, Yuzuru?’

‘BECAUSE I AM ALREADY DEAD!’

‘You are not dead!’ Javier closes the gap between their silhouettes that instance, his hand grabbing Yuzuru’s wrist with such brutish force he might break it. ‘I can feel it. Your pulse. The life running under your skin and inside your veins. You are alive, Yuzuru!’

It takes a few seconds for the young man to shake off the surprise of the touch on him, the sudden warmth and electric jolt betraying his beliefs, his resolution, Tian’s final wish. He yanks from the Spaniard’s restraining hold, his fingers digging into Javier’s chest instead as he seizes the spot right on top of the sternum where the heart should be, the fabric of the shirt caught on his feeble clasp.

‘This!’ Yuzuru pushes Javier back, just a little. ‘This is dead. This was never alive. I was never alive.’ His words are almost inaudible. ‘I can’t be alive. Not anymore.’ And he releases the creased garment.

‘You are an idiot, Yuzuru.’ There is no malice or hurt in Javier’s reply. There is truth, part of it, but more than that, there is understanding, and now that they are this close, both tired and fatigued from the shouting and senseless arguing, he feels he can lift Yuzuru’s sagged shoulders, the resigned posture and the downcast eyelids. He reaches for his hand again, gently this time, just to tell him to go back, just one step, one step away from the overwhelmingly deceiving freedom he is being offered.

_Please live, Javier._

But fate is a conjurer with time in their games for the crown and the first gust of gale rushes in the disguise of the night, a veil of dust settling upon their faces. Javier closes his eyes per instinct, the particles prickling his irises and nostrils, and he leans his body weight on the railing for support. There is a slight trembling on the iron bars, of bending and moving out of its initial place. He remembers vaguely the notice on the cork board at the entrance barring students and staff members from going to the rooftop due to the impending renovation work on the barriers that were damaged from the last storm.

Was this one of those?

It is less than a millisecond, quicker than a lightning flash, when two of the corroded pickets crack and break, mutely, ballerina flutters on the concrete. His hand slips from the uneven height, together with his balance, and gravity pulls him down.

The air feels weightless.

The air tastes of nothing.

Javier falls.


	10. Part X

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ‘You don’t have to promise to the world. Or to them. Or to fate. The reality is ours, Yuzuru, mine and yours. Only ours. No one else’s. Please, Yuzuru.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dear all, these past few days have been a constant battle with a very stubborn flu but the good thing is that I managed to finally finish this piece after all this time. I have to sincerely thank you all for sticking with this plot until the end, and also a special thank you to Mother_North for pulling me out of my writer's block and pulling me out of my own demons. A sincere thank you <3
> 
> Now that this one is finished, I can finally start working on new projects ;)
> 
> Disclaimer: The usual, work of fiction, only coincidences, don't take it to heart. 
> 
> Enjoy this finale!

An earthquake happens when two tectonic plates collide, molten basalt on plutonic granite, the ever cascading waves of foam riding over the dry earth at the feet of a poor farmer, scythe in his hand, the golden wheat not yet harvested and already withered by the seismic current. Or when a meteorite, a fragment from a soon to be named asteroid in the solar system, penetrates the protective spheres of the planet, the ozone, the oxygen, the nitrogen, the argon, and it crashes – _Bam!_ – on the chimney of the lowest rooftop of a soon to be forgotten village in a soon to be lamented corner of the…

Javier thinks that he might be one of these celestial travellers, abandoned by the mother colony in the asteroid belt, wandering perpetually in the emptiness of space until he finds someone he can destroy. Because asteroids are parasites waiting for revenge on the stars that guide souls to the next incarnation, or planets that host the essence of life. Perhaps he is really a leech, Javier thinks, pulled by other people’s warmth only to gnaw on it in one single bite and extinguishing the flame as he swallows without spitting. An emotionally deficient leech seeking for something he can never have – because he is falling on the hands of gravity and there will be an earthquake when he reaches the ground.

‘Javi!’

He flies instead. Javier knows he is flying, his body just a particle of cotton plucked from its buds before full maturation, a feather tumbled from a dove on its migration departure. He is flying, light and immaterial. It is good. So good. The faint kiss of the night breeze as he is engulfed by the vastness of nothing, chanting in his ears to come, _Come!_ , to play in the see-saw of silence, _Join us!_ , until fear metamorphizes into relief, and death into eternity.

‘JAVI!’

Javier opens his eyes with such ardour that his eyelids might slide over his forehead, as a hand, cold skin, trembling, soaked with sweat, grabs his, firm, a hook with the thumb and fingers like cords. Yuzuru leans forward just in time to catch his limb, his grip strong and solid, masqueraded by his fragile silhouette and porcelain complexion. How much has he been deceived by the doll-figure of his body, Javier wonders, by the dark cashmere of his hair and by the virgin, rosy lips.

How much he wished he could just kiss them one last time and taste the wild sweetness of vanilla flower, white petals on ripe red berries.

‘Javi! Please–‘, Yuzuru almost chokes on his own breathing, on the surge of air that lodges on his throat. It is almost painfully beautiful the brief gasp that escapes his mouth. Almost as if he cared.

A tear drops on his cheek, a sliver of rain just like on the first day they had met on this same rooftop, and it slides to his lips. Javier savours it, the salty trail scorching the downward path. He drinks of it, a beggar starving for more.

Javier smiles.

‘Why are you crying, Yuzuru?’

The younger man shakes his head, the tears blurring his vision. He holds on tightly, nails digging on skin and flesh, blood seeping from the slipping wounds.

‘I am not scared, Yuzuru. Not anymore.’

‘Please,’ the broken voice is the same one when their bodies were one, when Yuzuru chanted his name as he welcomed Javier inside of him, a contract of trust signed with sex but tainted by lust, ‘you cannot.’

‘I’m happy I have met you. I really wanted–‘

The index digit lapses through the knuckles as the young man loses the first match against gravity and his elbow his scrapped by the sandpaper, cement ground. Javier falls a few inches, enough to turn him into a pendulum, his feet stepping on hollow land, and he hears hisses and curses in a language he can’t understand.

There is a rivulet of crimson painting their wrists.

‘Why are you so angry, Yuzuru?’ So angry, so enraged, so agitated. So beautiful. ‘Let me go.’

He bites his lips, refusing another answer. His hair flips to the left and right a few times, except for his fringe plastered on his forehead. He tries to lift their combined weights again back to where the rusty railing was, back to the concrete squares of the rooftop.

‘Let me go, Yuzuru.’

‘No.’

‘Please.’

‘NO!’

The yell is mighty in its will but feeble as it loses itself in the clear sky. It is the scream of a child who has been coerced to become an adult, of a man who has been conscripted to never reach puberty. There are all contradictions and paradoxes in that pair of obsidian irises, now hidden by the veil of tears.

Javier knows of all the absurdities and enigmas in them and he too wants to become part of the puzzle.

‘Then save me, Yuzuru.’ The surprise exuded by the minimal gap of the flushed lips almost makes his vocabulary double, triple, expand to new words, some borrowed and some invented, just to see if he could draw more expressions from the distressed youth. ‘Save me, like you did that day. I am not _him_. I can never be him, Yuzuru. But you can save me!’

‘No, no.’ A scratched record, a song with only the treble clef written. ‘I–, please, no, I can’t–‘

‘I only want you, _Yuzu_!’

Javier flies. There are wings on his back, he thinks, when he leaps in the tide that propels the soles of his feet, the easiness he is lifted by the elbows, by the muscle of his arm, the levity of the lock between his and Yuzuru’s hand in contrast to the showdown of their strength. It is only a few seconds, but time has stopped, the world too, the axis conceding the way and delaying the rotations just for them.

He rises and he is pulled.

‘Yuzu–‘

A fist slams right on top of his chest, the closed digits shivering almost uncontrollably, knuckles pale with webs of veins on his sternum, before he is enveloped in the embrace of quavering shoulders. They are both kneeling on the hard concrete, grains of sand on their shirts, dust on their eyelashes.

‘Stupid! You fucking…’, the next words are muffled by the succession of punches on his torso until Javier runs his fingertips on the dark strands, of the colour of the night, the touch electrifying as it tiptoes the scalp.

‘Why?’ He places a platonic kiss on the creases on the forehead of the man in front of him. ‘Why did you save me, Yuzuru?’ He places another one, this one on the chin, where a dry trail of tears threatens to be reinstituted. He would not allow him of his avoidance game anymore.

‘Because…’, the lights on the Academy are switched off and the moonlight is the only glimmer that bathes the portrait of their shadows, ‘… because people would miss you.’

‘Would you miss me, Yuzuru?’

‘No. I–‘, he waits, patiently, even when his internal clock ticks at an accelerated pace, the adrenalin still coursing through his blood vessels, ‘I would–‘, another pause, one second, two, three seconds, a minute, _please tell me Yuzuru_ , ‘I would never forgive you!’

Javier nods, each bow of his head synchronized with a tear from his own eyes. They are not of regret and mourning, and yet they fall, each one of them burning his cheek with a promise of euphoria and release – of the shackles that imprisoned both he and the young man in front of him. ‘I’m sorry.’ He takes Yuzuru’s palm to his lips and licks the lifeline, the savoury and the metallic aftertaste at the tip of his tongue. ‘I’m so sorry, Yuzuru.’

‘Fuck you.’ There is no bitterness in the profanity, only the restrained whisper of a naughty child, and Javier chuckles, still nodding. ‘You have to live.’

‘ _We_ have to live. You and me. I can’t do this alone.’ He leans forward, closer, more, until there is almost no distance between their faces. He rests their foreheads together, nose rubbing nose, Yuzuru’s still hectic puffs of air brushing oh so lightly on his lips he can drink of each of them in one gulp. ‘I promise you I will live. Promise me too that you will.’

In the quietude of the night, cars already parked at the berm of the streets and traffic lights faltering in their power saving mode, Yuzuru pays loyalty to the taciturn silence and he bites his lips, front teeth pressing into the already abused and plump flesh.

There is no reply.

‘Please.’ The Spaniard kisses the bruised mouth, soft and casual, no force applied, just enough to draw back his attention. The honeyed vanilla is ever present though – the flavour of being alive. ‘You don’t have to promise to the world. Or to them. Or to fate. The reality is ours, Yuzuru, mine and yours. Only ours. No one else’s. Please, Yuzuru.’

‘Even if this world has already rejected us?’

He nods, certain and reassuring.

‘Then…’

Yuzuru is an angel, Javier thinks, and he knows, not a fallen angel, but one that had descended from the heavens on his own volition. He can’t help but look and stare at the lips that curve into a smile and the unrestrained laughter that is freed from that deceivingly slim, statuesque body, a sound so pure and free that he could lay on the melody and be deaf for eternity if that meant he could have that cry of mirth only for himself. He almost flinches when a thumb caresses his cheek, wiping his own tears. Javier doesn’t even realize he had been crying until their chests are pressed to each other, his own heartbeat synchronized with Yuzuru’s pulse.

‘… _Thank you_.’

 

 

_My dear Yuzu,_

_I don’t know why I couldn’t have said this before. I should have. I should have been stronger and told you it wasn’t your fault, but I just couldn’t. I hope that you will forgive me one day. I am sorry, Yuzuru. I am so sorry. If only I had been less of a coward. Please forgive me. Please forgive yourself._

_Do you still remember that bed in the hospital room, where we lay down together? I should have never let you run away with me. I loved you, Yuzuru. I truly did. You were my everything and I still love you. So much. I miss you so much, Yuzuru. But I had never learned how to tell you this. I never learned how to love myself just the way I loved you. I loved you so much and I hated myself even more. I was so scared when you didn’t wake that night. I thought the disgust of my own voice, the repulsion of my own skin, the sickness of my own life had contaminated you. I didn’t want you to see who I really was. I was too scared of losing you._

_I should have never pretended that I loved myself. I am sorry I have lied to you, Yuzuru._

_That is why you deserve so much more than I could have ever offered you. I could only leave back then. I couldn’t drag you to my well of poison anymore. You are not like me, Yuzuru. You are so much more than I could ever be._

_You are better._

_You saved me. You gave me love when the world had already given up on me. You saved me, Yuzuru, but I couldn’t save myself. I had lost the battle since I knew myself. I could never win. And so I had to leave. I am sorry, Yuzuru, but I had to leave you, or I would have corrupted you more than I had already done._

_Don’t cry anymore, my Yuzuru. You are free now. You can live now. Leave this burden behind. Leave this burden to me. I will take it. It will be my punishment for having deceived you, and my atonement until you can find the happiness you have always deserved. I will always protect you, Yuzuru._

_Leave this behind. Leave me behind, Yuzuru._

_Go to him. Go to him, Yuzuru. He needs you. And you need him._

_Thank you, Yuzuru, for loving me. And for letting me love you._

_Be happy._

Yuzuru traces the last words of the inscription on the marble stone, the engravings blended into the veining, mosaic patterns. The arrival of a particularly whimsical gust lifts the earthy ashes of the incense at his feet, and he closes his eyes instinctively. He thinks he hears a voice, _his_ voice, a murmur so low he cannot decipher the speech. But he understands, just like all the other times when silence addressed what they wanted to say, and the young man nods.

‘I won’t be coming here anymore.’

_Be happy._

He leaves behind a single white rose, the bud not yet blossomed, its beauty forever encapsulated from the world.

 

 

‘What are you doing here?’

Javier leans against the faded dark ginger door of his car stopped by the iron entrance gates, arms crossed as he taps his left foot in a peaceful rhythm. He extends a hand to Yuzuru, the raven-haired boy grabbing it firmly as he finishes the last step of the stairs of the hill. The corners of his obsidian irises are slightly red – perhaps it is the dry northernly winds – and Javier pulls him to his embrace.

‘I thought you might be hungry after all the hiking. You left without breakfast.’

‘I didn’t want to wake you up.’ The road is deserted except for the few sparrows perched on the highest branches of the willow grove opposite to them. ‘But I could eat something now.’

‘Let’s go to that café you like so much by the beach.’

Yuzuru shakes his head, pressing his body against Javier’s when the other man prepares to get into the car. ‘I want something more…’, he pretends to seriously consider different choices, his mouth quirking into different mute shapes, ‘… more _Spanish_ and _homemade_.’

They both enter the car, in silence, because in silence more words are spoken, and in silence the world cannot eavesdrop on their secret pact.

‘Pass by the supermarket on the way.’ Yuzuru buckles the seat belt and he laughs at Javier’s comic, confounded expression at the request. ‘You have no more matcha tea at home.’

‘You have no taste at all in drinks.’

The young man turns to the side, smiling, feigning tiredness, and he closes his eyes, not before taking one last glimpse at the reflection of the cemetery from the side-view mirror. ‘Stupid.’

 

_FIN_


End file.
